Hello! My how the summer flies by. Here we are at the end of July already. I have a few tidbits of news for you.
The date for the Midwest Regional Championship changed. The arena had an opportunity to book a concert for our original dates and offered us a strong incentive (i.e. discounted rental) if we would consider moving our event to the 1st weekend of December. We accepted the offer. The Midwest Regional Championship will now be on December 4-5, at Heartland Credit Union Arena (formerly known as Park City Arena).
Registration for this year is still open now. The link for the Registry is: https://registry.bestrobotics.org/
Deadline for registering your team is Aug 28. If you need help with how to register, check the Help scripts first. If you have issues with getting logged in, you can contact our support folks by using the ‘Email Support’ button on the Help page.
We have added some teams to the 2026 Roster. If you don’t see your team here and expect to, something must not have worked correctly, so try again, or call me.
Wichita Collegiate HS
Council Grove High School
Kapaun Mt. Carmel Catholic High School
Wichita Homeschool
Ellinwood High School
Central Christian Academy
Garden City High School
Rock Creek High School
Solomon High School
Campus High School
The returnable kits are nearly ready for distribution, and we should be getting the consumable materials soon so we can prepare those kits as well.
We are working with Kansas Education Service Centers and holding a workshop on July 28, 9-3:30 at the service center in Salina. Everyone is welcome. It will not be a full day of PowerPoint presentations. I have a list of topics we can discuss, and will be bringing the returnable and consumable kits so we can get familiar with them. Also bringing my test work bench so we can see how it all works, and maybe show you the programming in blocks as well. .
If you have students, staff, or parents that are aspiring photographers, journalists, or performers that would like to help us with photography, live streaming, or running the match clock during our events please put them in touch with me.
We would love to have more teams in our competition, so if you would like to forward this to other schools or community organizations, please do so. Our new policy includes community organizations such as YMCA’s, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, FFA, etc. the opportunity to organize teams. Contact me for more information on that.
I hope you are enjoying your summer break. I’ll continue to send out news over the next couple of months.
Thank you,
Linda Manfull
Co-Director Kansas BEST Robotics
linda.manfull@bestinc.org
kansasbest.org
