From Friday March 20th to Sunday March 22nd, Preuss’ robotics team the Midnight Mechanics competed in their first competition of the robotics season at Francis Parker High School. They managed to place 8th, ahead of 32 other teams from many different schools.
Competitions like these are a part of the First Robotics Competition (FRC), a program that allows robotics teams across the entire country to compete against each other at various events. Each school creates their own robot, which is designed specifically to complete a new task decided every year for each season.
The Midnight Mechanics team consists of multiple students who enrolled in the class or joined by choice and adult mentors like Mr. Hwang who all assist in building the robot but don’t actually compete.
“This year we had to change our robot so that it could launch balls up into the air and into a specific goal for points,” explained Mr. Hwang, the robotics teacher and mentor of the team.
Although the scoring is done individually as well, teams at these competitions are selected and put into alliances, which consist of robots from 3 different schools. These robots work as a team to score as many points as possible against other alliances in order to move on in the event.
Teams can learn from their performances after each event in order to improve their robots before the next one. One of the members of the Midnight Mechanics team who works on these improvements is Bao Nguyen.
“Right now we’re working on fixing some of the things that went wrong during that event so that we can hopefully do better for our next one,” shared Bao Nguyen (‘28), another member of the Midnight Mechanics.
The Midnight Mechanics plan on taking part in multiple other competitions throughout the robotics season in preparation for an event on the state level. Only the top 60 teams in the rankings qualify to compete in state, which this team has earned.
The California Southern State Championship is taking place from April 9 to April 12, in which the Midnight Mechanics will travel to Anaheim, California in order to compete.
“Qualifying for state is already a great achievement for the team so I believe we can do well in the competition and prove that we really did earn our spot there,” expressed Mr. Hwang.
