The Robotics Team, the RoboRaiders, competed in their first Austin area FTC qualifier competition Saturday, Dec. 7, at Vandegrift. The RoboRaiders made it to the semifinals and ranked 12th out of 24 teams.

“I felt like it was a good learning experience,” junior Nicholas Hickam said. “The way that we saw other people accomplish goals and tasks were different from our way of accomplishing goals and tasks, but there’s a lot of ups and downs on all the robots that we saw, and so we were trying to learn and see what we could piece together to make it better for next competition.”

The RoboRaiders meet Wednesday afternoons from 4-6 p.m. and Friday mornings at 8 a.m. in room 6302.

“[People should join Robotics] Because it’s a neat learning experience and with the technology and modern day approaches to making programs there’s going to be a lot more programs and coding classes that are going to be coming out,” Hiccum said. “It’s going to be a really modern thing soon and I feel like it would help accomplish tasks and it would help you explore another realm, just coding whatever you want to. You could be free in that space and just design whatever you want to and just let your soul be another person. Engineer whatever you want.”