The Carlmont Robotics team traveled to compete at the San Fransisco Regional Competition on the weekend of March 18.
The team successfully made it to the semifinals but were defeated by an alliance of world champions.
A big part of the competition is preparation and the ability to change parts of the robot during the day, so the Carlmont team was sure to capitalize on this skill while competing.
“We weren’t as prepared as we wanted to be for the first competition that we went to. We brought a bunch of the parts to the competition and spent some of the day assembling. The second competition that we went to we were pretty good,” Isaac Raskin, who leads the electronics board, said.
Not all of the trouble comes from the actual head to head competition, construction and development play a huge role in the success of the robot during the match, according to Raskin.
“We differ from a lot of the other teams because we had a really good robot that could feed cubes through the exchange, where you trade in cubes for power-ups that give you advantages. We were even able to score all nine cubes by ourselves in a single match,” Kevin Moy, who works on fabrication and leads the intake mechanism team, said.
In the excitement of the competition, strategies are often lost or abandoned, but Carlmont continued on their original plan to trade in cubes for power-ups instead of pushing for the occupation of the giant switch by pushing yellow cubes onto it, like the majority of the other teams did.
Our students worked hard and represented our school with the gracious professionalism that you would expect from our students.
— David Talcott
Apart from the match and construction, it is possible to earn other awards besides first place.
“We also focused on spirit and won two spirit awards at the competition for standing out by cheering during our matches. Its a lot of fun cheering for your team and be surrounded by other teammates cheering,” Moy said.
At the end of the day, the Carlmont team had a great time competing and cheering on their team during the Regional Competition.
David Talcott said, “Our students worked hard and represented our school with the gracious professionalism that you would expect from our students.”
