By Kelsey Kramer
The robotics team hosted their last tournament of the year with the oversight of Scott Santos.
The robotics teams’ competition grew from last year giving the audience a full experience of robotics competitions.
“Our home competition was a lot of fun,” said Santos. “Went from eleven teams in our competition the first year to 21 teams the second year and so the community got a good display of what competition robotics is.”
Santos sees improvement in his teams this year and sees the benefit of learning from shortcomings.
“All of our competition robotics teams are improving every single week with every single event,” said Santos. “We unfortunately didn’t qualify for state this year but I think there is a lot to gain in coming up short from our goals. Students get to go back to the drawing board and hopefully qualify for state next year.”
Santos put in a lot of work to host the event and hopes to improve the process in the future but otherwise, it was a successful event.
“Hosting a robotics event is a lot of work and I have a lot to learn in being more efficient in putting it on,” said Santos. “Everyone who attended seemed really impressed with the students and the robots they competed with. The event was a huge success.”
The robotics teams were faced with tough challenges and opponents this year. Sophomore Violet Amato and her team faced challenges that they were able to overcome.
“We kinda had a lot of problems but we were able to fix a bunch of them,” said Violet Amato. “Our teammates weren’t too good and we were up against really hard people so we didn’t do too well. I feel like we could set more goals because we were all over the place.”
Sophomore Jonathan Meza gained inspiration and ideas for next year from the unique robots present.
“Every competition there is a bunch of different designed robots and after the competition, you get all these ideas, creative ideas that you can add on to your robot, change about it, or even improve on it,” said Meza.
Jonathan Meza intends to improve his building skills and learn from this competition.
“We made it to the semifinals but after that, we kind of lost, ” said Meza. “We were able to take it as a learning experience for next time. I hope to get more creativity and building skills and learn how different systems could work if put in different situations like different climb mechanisms, push mechanisms, and stuff like that.”
