Hello everyone! It’s that time of year again when we start building energy around this year’s game. Byte to Bite is going introduce us to new technologies in the farm-to-table industry, and present some really amazing new challenges for the robots.
You may be wondering about the ‘Midwest BEST Regional Championship’ listed in the events. We have renamed the Denver BEST Regional Championship since we are not limiting our location to Denver any longer. We hosted the Regional Championship last year in Wichita. This year we are hosting again, but have secured Heartland Credit Union Arena in Park City for the event. We hope all teams will consider coming to the event and see what the competition of 32 teams looks like. If you aren’t competing, we’d love to have you help us. The team from Council Grove helped last year with resetting the field. (THANK YOU Tracie and team!). There are lots of other things that we can use help with too. We want the teams traveling to Kansas to have a great experience while they are here. Remember, this is all done by volunteers and you can experience the event from a different perspective!
Here are the teams registered for the 2026 competition. If you think you registered, but don’t see your team here, please try it again.
Central Christian Academy
Garden City High School
Kapaun Mt. Carmel Catholic High School
Solomon High School (Welcome back!)
Wichita Home School
Council Grove
Registration for this year is open now. The link for the Registry is: https://registry.bestrobotics.org/
I have been experiencing an issue occasionally when I try to use this address. If I open a session in Chrome’s ‘Icognito’ mode, it works fine. IT support says clearing cookies can also help. If you still can’t get there, let me know. Deadline for registering your team is Aug 28.
Thank you so much for returning all the Returnable Kits. We have them all and will be working to get them all tested. There will be an additional component added this year, but I can’t tell you what it is. You’ll find out at Kickoff.
bESTology is being reworked currently, but I believe they plan to have it available by end of June. For those of you not familiar, bESTology posts articles supporting the theme of the game each year. It is a way for students to start learning something about the real-world context of the challenge, and possibly start thinking about the research paper for the notebooks.
BESTedu (https://bestedu.bestrobotics.org/) is available as well. It has a lot of video tutorials on various aspects of the program. Select a subject or role to filter down applicable content. There is still stuff out there supporting the Gizmo and Arduino platform that was in use last year, and you are welcome to review that content, but just be aware that we will be using exclusively the VEX V5 platform in Kansas and the Midwest Regional Championship.
We had a small workshop with some of the coaches last summer. I think it was well received. I am open to doing that again this year if you like, probably in July. Please let me know if you have interest. We can get space at WSU College of Engineering just about any time. So if you are interested, please include whether something during the week or on a Saturday would work best, any particular subjects you would like to discuss, etc.
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
