Woodside’s robotics team, Team 100, is back to competing after having both of their last two seasons canceled because of COVID.
“We just started our competition season a few weeks ago,” President of Team 100, Nayan Smuek said. “We’ve been working really hard on getting prototypes done and have moved on to making an actual robot. It’s still in the early stages.”
The Wildhats are in their build season and currently meet seven days a week, but outside of build season meet twice a week.
“We’re really excited about the progress we’ve made and excited to go to competitions in about a month,” Smuek said. “Our first one is in San Francisco, [and] we’ll get to test out all of our code and robot parts there.”
Every year, the team works together to raise funds for, design, and build a robot that they take to competitions.
“One of the most exciting challenges that we’re working on right now is getting the robot to climb a set of monkey bars,” Smuek stated. “It’s harder than you’d think.”
The team did not compete at all last season due to COVID.
“Right now we’ve probably got twenty people who come in regularly,” Smuek said. “We’re a fairly rookie team, even though we’re one of the longest-running teams in the nation… We lost a number of members over COVID, so we’re mostly rebuilding this year.”
The team hopes to win their two regional competitions and eventually make it to nationals, which they previously went to in 2017.
“Last year, we didn’t really have a season but everyone’s been learning a lot and working on their skills,” Smuek stated.
