The Robotics Team won fifth place at the state championships and ninth place at the regional competition at California State University Northridge and L.A. Valley College respectively.
There were a total of about 50 to 60 teams at the regional competition and around 60 teams at the state championships.

This year’s First Tech Challenge Competition is called “Quad Quandary.”  In this competition, teams must score the most points in various tasks.

Some of the tasks include moving PVC rings across the field to score goals, placing the movable goals into the team’s quadrants and scoring rings on posts of those goals.

There is also an autonomous period when the robot’s programming is in control.

 “Since we had a large team of about 10 this year, we decided to build two robots,” Robotics team captain Gordon Wintrob ’08 said. “We settled upon two designs: a brute-force robot designed for maximum reliability and a more complex robot that tried to score on the high goals.”

The team met every Sunday for two months to build the robots from scratch.

They also had to keep records of their progress in engineering notebooks.

 The regional competition was Nov. 18 and the state championships took place last Saturday. At CSUN, the team reached the playoffs and almost earned a spot for the national championships.
“I hope the team will continue to compete so strongly and also grow in size,” Wintrob said.