Over the past weekend, the FIRST Silicon Valley Regional robotics competition was held at Woodside for the first time. 38 teams from around the Bay Area, and one from Hawaii, competed.
This year, the theme for the FIRST robotics competition is Reefscape, which involves designing a robot that can place PVC pipes on a reef-shaped structure, removing and throwing yoga balls and climbing up a structure. During the competition, teams are divided into “red” and “blue” to compete for the most points.
Team 1323 MadTown Robotics from Madera High School were ranked first overall by the end of the weekend. Team 766 M-A Bears from Menlo-Atherton High School has been working for over two months building their robot.
“From the time we got the kickoff, we’ve gone through brainstorming and then prototyping many of our mechanisms,” lead mentor Ryan Cahoon said. “[We have made] two iterations of our robots.”
The M-A Bears have attended the FIRST Silicon Valley Regionals for most years of their 24-year-long existence. The Bears went on to win the Engineering Impact Award at the competition this year and were ranked third.
“We’re excited to be here,” Cahoon said. “We’ve also been to Woodside in the past for some of the off-season competitions…it’s a great venue. We love your school.”
It’s the first time Design Tech High School’s robotics team, Team 5940 BREAD, has competed at the FIRST Silicon Valley Regional. The team is named after the local Panera Bread they all hang out at after school. They went on to win the Excellence in Engineering Award and were ranked second place, making them one of the two regional winners of the competition.
“[To prepare for the competition], we built a robot,” junior Alisha Eldershaw said. “So there’s that. We [also] spent a lot of time programming and giving our driver [of the robot] a bunch of practice.”
One team, Team 3880 Tiki Techs from Kealakehe High School in Hawaii, had to ship their robot to California for competition.
“In the past we used to take the bot apart, but we’ve been lucky enough to have an Amazon partnership this year,” junior Audrey said. “They helped us ship our bot in a shipping container.”
For the Tiki Techs, this competition was not the first of the season.
“We competed in Ventura last week,” Audrey said. “We didn’t perform as well as we thought we would, so we spent some time down in San Diego working with another team to just really perfect our bot.”
The team ended up winning the most prestigious award, the FIRST Impact Award, and were ranked fourth in the competition.
Over the past week and a half, the M-A Bears have been working on shaving down their robot’s weight to be within the competition’s weight regulation.
“We have a lot of capability that we are trying to fit in a very small package,” Cahoon said. “We didn’t realize how much weight we were taking up… until after we’d built everything.”
Despite these struggles, both teams have come out with better robots for the competition.
“This is the most prepared we’ve been for our first event in the last several years,” Kahoon said, “We are 100% where we want to be. We’re excited to do well this weekend.”
