On April 28th, Robotics Club advisor and Physics Teacher Brian Morrison and nine students ventured to UMASS Lowell to compete in the annual regional Botball Tournament competing against 28 other schools. Botball is a robotics competition in which they are given a set list of materials and have to create a robot that can perform several different tasks to earn the team points.
Junior Daniel Augustin described it as “a robotics competition where teams are required to build and code two robots to compete for the most points.”
The project took awhile to create, Augustin explained, “[They] worked from 3 to usually around 9 after school. All this time was needed because a lot of things did not go as planned and [they] had to adjust for them on the go.”
Sophomore Jacky Luong told us that they” worked very hard on it, sometimes they stayed till 10pm at the school.”This is Luong’s first year in club and at Botball, but it is not
Overall, their team placed 5th at the regional competition which as Augustin described “Although we ended up top 5 in the region we did not do as well as we did the previous year where we ended #1 in the region.”
Junior Angela Soliz stated “ [They] learned that despite planning for everything and wanting to make sure its perfect, something can move slightly and hinder the entire process, it can become extremely frustrating considering all of the time that went into it. But, it’s important to stay patient.” She also explained that it is stressful, but easier to stay patient because they knew that other teams probably made similar mistakes.
This is the clubs 5th year participating in Botball and they hope to do it again.
