On Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, March 23, 24, and 25 Fossil Ridge High School’s Robotics team, Ridgebotics, qualified for the World Championship at the Colorado Regional in Denver. This is the first time in school history a Ridgebotics team has had such success. The team also received pit safety and creativity awards.

Building, marketing, and programming teams cheer from the sidelines.

Photo Credit: Karen Manley

“It feels amazing, exhausting, thrilling, and rewarding. Now we have three weeks to raise around ten thousand dollars and the robot is very broken so we have a lot of work to do,” said senior, Richard Thompson. Worlds will be held in Houston, Texas this year, and the team is working hard to be able to go.

Thompson went on to explain, “each year the makers of the game, For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) create a game that we have six weeks to build a robot and practice for and then we have to seal it and not touch it until competition.”

From there, teams compete in qualifiers against teams from all over the world. Six teams compete in each match, three on the red alliance and three on the blue. The robots work both autonomously and under student control to complete the task given that year by FIRST. To see an explanation of this year’s tasks, click here.

This year’s arena setup had a steampunk theme.

Photo Credit: Karen Manley

After the first day, the team was in the top 8, setting them up to be in the finals of qualifications, in which they finished third. This gave Ridgebotics the chance to choose their alliance for the remaining matches of the elimination rounds. They selected team 399 Eagle Robotics from California and team 1339 Angelbotics from Denver.

A major part of robotics that many students outside of the program are unaware of is advertising. Teams in the finals get to select their alliances as opposed to being randomly assigned, so it is crucial to brand your team into the minds of those who have the possibility of selecting you. This consists of more than having an effective robot, and includes showmanship, workspace interest, and a large sponsorship.

Katie Plese explained another aspect of robotics that flies a little below the radar of most students: community service. “We reach out to our FFL teams which are the younger teams, we are looking towards this summer at starting a camp to help them out. We do public outreach events, we run the Colorado Kickoff, we attend all football games and most basketball games and shoot t-shirts to the fans using our t-shirt robot.  We are looking at this coming year doing some things to help out the less fortunate part of our community as well.”

Lots of work goes into Ridgebotics that the general public never gets to see. “We spend 35 hours a week working on it. It’s like a full time job on top of school,” said Joseph Nease. If you see any Ridgebotics participants in the halls be sure to congratulate them and wish them the best of luck in Houston.