Cameron Schiller ’19 won first place in the First Annual Spartan Championship robotics competition at La Verne High School on Oct. 18. Miles Agus ’18 and DJ Lesh ’18 also participated in making the winning robot.

The competition measured the robot’s ability to stack cones on top of both mobile and stationary goals.

The sophomore team consisting of Justin Ansell ’20, Dean Reiter ’20 and Coco Kaleel ’20 ranked highest during the qualification round, which they said was an improvement from previous years.

The teams were only able to work on their robots for a few weeks. Robotics coach Andrew Theiss said that they were able to overcome this obstacle and achieve success through their drive, hard work and communication.

“The team has very dedicated members and their ability is noticeably increasing every day,” Theiss said.

Kaleel said that she was pleased with her team’s results and hopes that she can use the information she learned in the competition to improve in the future.

“At the middle school last year, we didn’t do super well in tournaments since we it was the first time we had ever done VEX,” Kaleel said. “My team got to semi-finals this year, which is a lot further than we usually got in tournaments last year.  We are pretty happy with that and we are going to make alterations to our robot and continue competing.”