Malden High School’s Robotics club came back from regionals as two-time winners of the 2019 New England Botball. Beating twenty other teams including Malden Catholic who came in third place.
According to the KISS Institute for Practical Robotics, Botball is “an Educational Robotics Program which includes middle and high school aged students in a team-oriented robotics competition, and serves as a perfect way to meet today’s new common core standards.”
The robotics club had built “robots that were best set for the tasks that [they] wanted,” stated senior Daniel Augustin, president of the robotics club. They were given a kit of material with legal parts that they were allowed to use in the robot. “The documents needed to build the board and the rules that were set in place were sent to us at the end of December” leading to the club’s preparations starting at the end of December.
“We started building the board right away but we took some weeks off before starting to build the robot because we were all busy,” said Augustin.
The club attended the New England Botball Regional Tournament on April 27th, 2019 in Lowell, MA. President of the Robotics, Daniel Augustin, stated that this year’s competition went “…amazing as usual. But a problem that there was this year was that the volunteers were not as prepared as they were supposed to be…” with “a lot of mistakes that we had to correct them on.” The club has been attending the regionals for the past six years winning this year’s and last year’s competition of which Augustin was president for both years.
When it came to how the team felt throughout the competition, junior Jacky Luong says that “seeing [their] robots perform better and better as the day went on raised [their] hopes more and more, and defeating the most threatening opponent (Winchester, who dedicates a whole class for the entire year to the competition) was uplifting.”
Luong continued to say that everyone “had strong communication and cooperation throughout the entire competition, never failing to forget that [they] were a team, and the atmosphere was very encouraging with members from some teams talking to one another, giving each other good wishes.”
The competition included a seeding round and a double eliminations round. The seeding round had every team take up a whole board to themselves and use at least two robots to score as many points as they could to determine their position in the brackets for a double elimination.
In the double eliminations round, each team would have an opponent sharing the middle of each board. Meaning that if one team took an object from the middle, the other team would not be able to take it as well, if it was included in their plan, the team with the highest points won.
