This year marks the first for the Robotics Team and so far things are looking up for the young squad.

The idea for to the team came shortly after Computer Science teacher Mimi Kupec went to one of her son’s First Tech Challenge competitions. Impressed on what took place at the meet, with all the cool gizmos and gadgets the teams had built, she felt the need to bring that to the school. Architect teacher and co-sponsor Ricky Bowers also helped get the team up and running.

“The coolest thing about robotics is seeing the kids collaborate,” Bowers said. “It’s nice watching software kids learn about hardware and hardware kids learn about software.”

In December the team, who named themselves the RoboRaiders, entered their first FTC qualifier competition at Vandegrift. The team advanced to the semifinals, ranking 12th out of 24 teams.

“I felt like it was a good learning experience,” junior Nicolas Hickam said. “The way that we saw other people accomplishing goals and tasks, but there’s lots 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.”

In resilient fashion, shortly after the meet the team got back to the drawing board and started preparing for the next competition. They built a robot that could pick up and drop blocks into a bucket.

“It’s not the coolest thing we’ve built,” junior Andrew Neely said. “But it’s cool because we had to overcome something to make it.”

The next FTC qualifier was at Connally High School Jan. 25 where the team advanced to the semifinals again.

“We did okay, it was just the little things and small mistakes that what hurt us,” Bowers said. “But it’s all good, I mean this was your rookie year so I think we did alright making it to the semifinal round twice.”