The Robotics Club participated in the third Central Valley Regional FIRST Robotics Competition at Madera South High School in Madera, Calif. from March 7 to March 9 and prepared for the Los Angeles Regional FIRST Robotics Competition in Long Beach on March 20 through March 22.

“We honestly did not do very well,” Robotics co-captain William Lee ’14 said. “We did not have a functioning robot at the start of the competition. But by the second day, we got our robot to work and fared much better in the competition.”

The team placed 39th out of 45 competing teams with four wins against six losses when racing the robots, and had one disqualification.

Due to the limited amount of hotel rooms, only 11 club members including science teacher Karen Hutchison and mathematics teacher Jason Fieldman attended the competition.

“For Long Beach, we plan on staying at a hotel as well,” Lee said. “But we can accommodate more people. But this time we are going to have a much better robot.”

The robot they are working on is offense-based but also capable of playing defense. They will continue to make modifications to their robot this weekend for the upcoming tournament in Long Beach.
The team started later than most other teams and had only six weeks to prepare due to midterms.

“The experience so far has been rewarding,” Lee said. “And we will be trying our best [this] week.”