by Darby Wright
OCS freshman
The Orcas Christian School robotics team traveled to Arlington to compete against other teams in our league on Dec. 10.
To our surprise, we placed first! Our team is a part of FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Competition, which is a program that wants to spark young people’s interests in science and technology.
It was quite a long day, but in the end, it was completely rewarding. We have worked very hard over this last month to design and program our robot to make sure it is efficient for our upcoming competitions. Our robot can move forward and backwards, it can also turn and it can even shoot balls.
At our competitions we have two-minute matches and compete against others to try to receive the most points. At our competitions we get to hit beacons, which are boxes that have a button on the front. When you hit the button it turns either red or blue. If you are on the blue team, you want to hit it blue, if you are on the red team you want to hit it red. We also get a chance to shoot balls, also known as particles.
Our builders, Robert Miller, Eber Lucas, Corey Aragon and David Juarez as well as our programmers Lucien Anderson and Darby Wright have worked very hard to improve our robot more and more every class period. Our PR is handled by Bayley Murray and Alexandra Marney.
We have been working on making moderations and new designs on our robot for our upcoming competition, which will be the Interleague Championships. This event is on Jan. 15 in Everett, and we will be competing against 35 other teams. We are really looking forward to it. This event could potentially be our last competition, but either way we are very excited to show what our robot can do.
We are also very excited because we just received our team shirts. At the Dec. 10 competition, we were one of the only teams that did not have team shirts, but this next event we will be happy to show that we got them.
This robotics season has definitely been a challenge for us but we have been able to persevere and accomplish what we need to. This season has definitely been a success for us. Coming from 13th place to 1st place was a huge accomplishment for our team. All of us have enjoyed robotics this year, and we are very glad we have been able to have the opportunity to do so.
