Gearing Up for Success: The Robotics club is doing their First Tech Challenge in December and they have been prepping since August

The East Robotics team is preparing for the annual “Tech Challenge” competition on Dec. 9 at Lakewood Middle School, with the organization FIRST hosting 265 schools from across the state.

The competition utilizes a prompt to challenge participants to creatively complete the task at hand by coding, building and testing robots. This year’s prompt is to lift various hexagons using a robot created by students. The more hexagons the robot picks up and places in a specific amount of time, the more points the team gets.

This is the first competition this year, and East’s robotics team has been preparing vigorously for the past few months. Freshman Carter Wild helps construct these robots and test their functionality in the ten days leading up to the event. 

“Right now we’re just adding some final touches to the robots,” Wild said. “Anything we can do to get more points in the competition and make sure that everything works, like double-checking the code.”  

At the start of the challenge, students are paired with another team to go compete against participants from other schools. Each round they’re paired with a new team that they’ve never challenged before.

Students have to anticipate the opposing team’s unique ways of gathering the most points, according to Sophomore Sage Lickteig. 

“Every round you’re stuck with another team that you’ve never met before,” Lickteig said. “And so you have to know their plan of attack and know what they’re going to do.”

Utilizing the bolts, screws and trinkets around, the team assesses and navigates the other teams and figures out what areas they need to improve in. 

There are two sections during the competition: the autonomous section and the driver section. In the autonomous section, participants can practice within 30 seconds leading up to the actual competition, testing what is needed before the actual recorded competition. The driver period is the alloted time where students have to complete the challenge to the best of their ability — the section where their scores are recorded. 

Sophomore Jacob Winfield believes that this year has been more challenging than last year since losing team members.

“Last year we had a senior who pretty much guided us through the whole thing,” Winfield said. “This year, we’re pretty much on our own, so we have to do stuff for ourselves. We have different types of wheels and different claw designs. Everything changed, and we’re using different parts that we didn’t have access to last year.”

Sophomore Sage Lickteig sacrificed her spot on the advanced team to help out the freshmen team full-time. 

“Instead of being on the advanced team, I’m [helping] build their robot for the freshmen,” Lickteig said. “[I’m] helping them to understand all the new terms because no one did that for us last year.”

This is a big step up for freshmen from the robotics program at Indian Hills Middle School, according to freshman Carter Wild.

“The biggest difference would be the complexity of what we’re doing,” Wild said. “We’re using a lot more advanced parts and doing a lot more advanced functions and activities.”

The competitions start with a local kickoff, then move up exponentially. After passing regionals and the city-based championship, the best of the best compete to claim the title of “National Robotics Champion.”

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