Courtesy Photo Members of the Alpena High School robotics drive team, from left to right, Jack Caplis, Maddi Shearer, Mr. Jones, and Maddox Chabot discuss strategy with their alliance before a match.

This past weekend Alpena High School’s robotics team traveled to Lake City to compete in the first of two regional competitions. On Saturday, they battled 21 of the 37 robotics teams, in eight qualification matches, and ended the day with a 7-1-0 record. The team started Sunday’s qualification matches in second place. It wasn’t easy. The robot didn’t always cooperate.

Instead of facing an opponent one-on-one, FIRST Robotics matches pit three robots from different schools, working together in an alliance, against three other schools’ robots. This style of play encourages the type of teamwork and cooperation needed to be successful in business and engineering, career pathways many of these AHS students are preparing for with their participation in robotics. The alliance system also created one of the biggest challenges on Saturday. After winning their first seven matches, Alpena’s Team 5505 had a cooperating robot. Unfortunately, for their eighth match, the other teams in their alliance were having problems.

Chelsea High School’s Team 1502 is named Technical Difficulties, and that is exactly what they had. While preparing to enter the field for a match Chelsea broke a chain driving an important component of their robot. They were now, in fact, having technical difficulties. To make matters worse, the third team in their alliance struggled all day to score points in the game. To win this match, Alpena needed to score most of the points.

Jack Caplis, a junior, helped operate the robot during the competition.

He said, “Our alliance consisted of two bots, one who couldn’t score and one who could only score the lowest level. We wanted to win, but we were against decent teams, so we were stressed. We had a challenge. We had to figure out how to help another team in our alliance before our match.”

Alpena decided scoring more points during the autonomous period would help because game pieces placed during the 15-second autonomous period are worth more than pieces scored during the diver-controlled portion of a match.

Madison Shearer, a senior technician and programmer who wrote the code for the autonomous period, discussed the importance of teamwork.

“Collaboration and teamwork makes robotics successful,” Shearer said. “Everyone coming together and merging all their ideas,” helps the team improve.

Shearer spent many hours in the robotics lab programming the robot, and in this match, the team finally found success running their first successful two piece “Auton” and scoring two game pieces autonomously. It wasn’t enough.

Trying to make up for Chelsea’s broken robot on their alliance, Caplis said, “We were going too fast throughout the match, causing us to drop pieces,” resulting in Team 5505’s first loss.

Win or lose, the students all worked together with a drive to compete and learn.

Austin Rienhardt, a senior on the pit crew, the mechanical team, and a designer using CAD, said it takes “a lot of dedication and a lot of hard work. Being really open to change and understanding that the mentors know a lot more. It’s important that you know what you are making, especially in design.”

Jessica Stepaniak works on the pit crew as a member of both the mechanical and the electrical teams. She said, “It takes a lot of determination and a lot of commitment of your time to create the robot.”

At the competition, Lead Mentor Chris Boyk said, “Good teams arrive at competition early. They get to the stands early for scouting. They get inspected early and get to the field to calibrate their cameras, and practice their Auton. Good teams get in line early to run as many practice matches as they can.”

He said you can see the effort they make toward continuous improvement, saying successful teams “consistently try to improve the robot, even if it’s not broken. Just walking through the pits, you can tell which teams are successful by watching the pit crews between matches.”

The students all have a similar attitude.

Liam Kieliszewski said success on this team requires “showing up on time as much as possible and always looking for something to do,” he reflects, “I take initiative.”

From January through the first competition in early March, AHS Robotics students spent almost every day in the robotics lab. Late nights, early mornings on the weekends, and even longer hours during competitions helped the team end Saturday with seven wins and one loss. Team 5505’s hard work and dedication had them in second place out of 37 teams from around the state with another full day of competition ahead. By early Sunday morning, the team was in first place.

Information for this article was provided by John Caplis, an assistant principal at AHS and a team mentor. See the final results from the weekend competition and more info on the AHS robotics team in Tuesday’s edition of The News.