This year, Woodside’s robotics club Team 100, or the Wildhats, competed in two regional competitions in hopes of qualifying for the World Championship.
The official FIRST robotics game this year was Reefscape, which was announced on Jan. 1 and involved designing a robot to place PVC pipes on reef-shaped structures. After designing, building and preparing their robot for many months, they competed in their first competition at the Silicon Valley Regional, which was hosted at Woodside.
“In January, it’s trying to find out what the game is,” Team 100 mentor Robert Ruth said. “That’s when [the team starts] competitive design build and then the competitive play matches. That wraps up with the World Championship in mid-April.”
Sadly, the Wildhats did not win a regional competition and therefore did not qualify for the World Championship. Many of the players thought their season could have gone better, but acknowledged that there were a lot of learning moments and growth for the team. They thought that there were some things they could improve that would have made the season smoother.
“We need to work on our speediness of design,” senior captain Andrew Hendricksen said. “This year was a pick and place game and last year was a shooter game.”
There are also other things that they want to focus on improving specifically for next year. Though Hendricksen will not be here next year, he still hopes for improvement for future seasons.
“I hope they have a more improved training plan off season and are able to get more people proficient at doing mechanical design faster,” Hendrikcson said. “And making sure that the robot’s design is not overly complex.”
The off-season is also important. During this time, they do a lot of things to prepare for next year’s upcoming season.
“We still have practice three times a week, and we work on rookie training, which basically means next year’s first-time robotics people,” freshman Lucía Bellver Eymann said. “We plan what they’re gonna do [and what to] train them.”
Even when the official competition season is over, there are still other games the team participates in.
“We’ll participate in off-season competitions for fun,” Hendricksen said. “We’re thinking about going to one of those in a couple of weeks.”
The rest of the season is an opportunity for the students to explore more of their interests.
“We want this to be really geared towards students and what they want to learn,” Ruth said. “So some of them want to learn more skills, like fabrication skills, and get deeper on that. Others want to focus on mechanisms. They want to build elevators or shooters. So we’ll do a little bit of both.”
