The Clairton High School robotics team put in countless hours to design the fighting robots that were crowned the grand champions of the Southwestern Pennsylvania BotsIQ Regional Competition last month at California University of Pennsylvania.

Since then, the team has been hard at work again, but this time on two tasks: the first, repairing and upgrading their robots; the second, raising enough money to attend the national robotics competition in Indianapolis next weekend.

While other schools districts may be able to cover the cost of sending their high school teams to the competition, Clairton, one of the region’s smallest districts with about 780 students, and one of its poorest, cannot afford to pay the $4,000 minimum cost for the five students, the teacher sponsor and a chaperone to travel to Indianapolis for the competition. Ideally, the students are hoping to raise an additional $1,000 to purchase spare parts for their fighting robots, which like race cars, require replacement parts to be used during competitions.

So far, they’ve raised $1,400 by holding a Penguins ticket raffle, sponsoring an after-school robotics program and sending out solicitation letters. But they need to come up with the remainder before Friday night, when they are scheduled to leave for the national competition.

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