The Houston championships lasted four days, during which the team won “Rookie of the Year” team in their category.
“We were screaming the whole time,” said Sophia Lander, one of the captains for the team, Gem City Gridrunners, said of the competition.
The team was part of an alliance (several teams working together) who won the championship title in Huntsville, Alabama in March. They won “Rookie of the Year” team in that competition as well.
The team had to build a robot that would “clean coral” or remove balls from a setup and put coral on the “reef,” a bucket in the center of the match. The robots can also play “defense,” or block the other team from scoring.
Schrock said the team is built on different talents. There are students who build the robot and code it, students who run the robots at competitions, and students who reach out to businesses and find grants to pay for the robotics competition.
Schrock and another teacher, Tyler Hertenstein, coached and recruited additional coaches from the public, many of whom worked with the Air Force or Space Force, he said.
The high school had a smaller robotics team competing in a different league last year, Schrock said, but there was enough interest from the students to make a 50-person team this year.
William Lewis, a first-year member of the team and a senior, said being on the team taught him a lot. He will be able to graduate high school with two certifications in robotics, he said.
Lander said FIRST robotics is focused on working together even while competing. She said other teams helped them rebuild parts of the robot with the understanding it wasn’t really a competition if the other team wasn’t at their best.
When the team had a hard time fitting robots into their bus on the way back from Houston, the robotics team from Lakota offered to take it back on theirs, Schrock said.
Schrock said the students practiced hard, sometimes seven days a week, since the summer.
“The lesson is that they worked hard, and it paid off,” said STEM High School principal Nick Pant.
Schrock said even more students are interested in joining the team next year.
“The more students who get opportunities like this, the better it is for everyone,” Lander said.
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