“Huh? We won?” the team whispered amongst themselves when the announcer called their name. They walk down the bleachers with jelly legs. The high five line is a blur. The team is so nervous they forget to take their trophy. They had just won the design award.
Trobotix II, West High’s Junior Varsity robotics team, made their debut this year. With guidance from their mentors and Varsity team, the rookie team prepared for their first league tournament and made it to state.
In FIRST Tech Challenge robotics, The league tournament is the competition that decides if a team gets to advance to state, or if their season ends. It has two parts, judge interviews and qualification matches. Teams can advance to state by either winning an award via demonstrating leadership during their judge interviews, or by scoring a high score during the qualification matches.
Preparing for the league tournament was quite stressful. Practicing the judge interview, polishing the robot’s programming, and decorating the robot are some of the things the team was working on the week of the tournament. Programmer Alex Ruiz ‘27, notes the stressful week.
“[the week was] very hectic with everyone stressing out about multiple things,” Ruiz said. “We had to do a lot of programming since we were falling back [because] a lot of [parts] breaking.”
One of the challenges the team faced was with the autonomous. Autonomous is the robot’s programming during the first 30 seconds of the game where the robot moves solely based on its programming, without a driver controlling it. Sam Weitz ‘26, a builder on the team, states some of the problems the team has encountered on the way.
“I think the most challenging thing that we faced during the league tournament was the inconsistent autonomous [and] parts of the robot Burning out because of stress,” Weitz Said.
Managing all of that was hard, especially for a team’s first year. But the team was able to make do and prepare well.
We decided to have a bunch of extra time and we did some [work] outside of school hours
— Alex Ruiz '27
Being on the team has taught the members valuable lessons and skills. Team captain Jennifer Zeng ‘26 shares one of the most useful things she learned in robotics.
“The trial and error process was a big thing,” Zeng said. “Learning to take failures and improve because of them, I think that will be a really important skill to have in the future.”
Trobotix II won the design award for their well-described robot design. The award acted as their ticket to the state championship.
“Our main goal [for state] is to just have fun, maybe learn some stuff, and try our best,” Zeng said.
