KOKOMO, Ind. — A high school robotics club engineered and constructed a ball that will drop New Years Eve in their hometown.  

Kokomo, Indiana will welcome another new year with the help of the TechnoKats, a high school robotics club.  

The TechnoKats have been working on the ball since this summer, along with other projects, and a group of seven students spent all day Tuesday putting the final touches on it. The ball is made up of pentagonal panels that each contain 20 triangles of LED lights. The panels are attached to a steel frame inside the ball, and then sheets of white, flexible plastic cut into triangles are placed over the electric panels, which are solar-powered.

“We’re making sure all the pentagons are on there, and we’re making sure it all works with the software,” said Nicholas Pherson, a senior who joined the KHS robotics team last January after moving to Kokomo from Tennessee.

Attaching the final panel was the most difficult because it was hard to get a good angle to screw it into place, the students said. At one point, five students all leaned into and held up different sides of the ball, trying to get the last panel to stay put. Alan Anderson, who supervises the project along with Mike Carmain, operated the lights from a laptop set up near the ball. He already had the countdown clock going, with 203,300-and-some seconds left until the start of 2016 at that point on Tuesday.

“Liesl [Elkin, the electrical lead for the ball], has worked very hard on this for quite a while. I trust her judgment. … I think it’s going to work quite smoothly,” he said. “The kids who work on this put in so many hours and so much effort. We pour our heart and soul into this.”

Elkin, a freshman, joined the TechnoKats FIRST robotics team after participating in First Lego League at her middle school.

“I decided I might as well join the team,” she said. “I really like electrical engineering.”

This is the 17th year the Kokomo High School robotics club has organized a New Year’s Eve ball drop for downtown Kokomo, with this year’s ball featuring 32,000 LED lights and 59 strobe lights. While many people associate New Year’s Eve with the iconic Times Square ball drop in New York City, the TechnoKats actually beat NYC in the switch to LED lights by three years; the old ball, which was retired in 2004, still sits in the TechnoKats shop space at Duke Energy.

“My favorite part is teaching the students about the ball, how it works and learning how to repair it,” Carmain said. 

The annual ball drop is part of the New Year’s Eve celebration hosted by the Greater Kokomo Economic Development Alliance. 

“I feel like it’s been a great learning experience for me personally, and I feel like we’ve helped the community,” Pherson said. 

Slagter writes for the (Indiana) Kokomo Tribune.