Last month, Harker’s upper school robotics team traveled to Houston for the FIRST Championship, an international competition with representation from more than 60 countries. It was the team’s first appearance at the championships since 2005, and signs were good early on, as the team cleared the quarterfinals of its group “by a wide margin,” said upper school computer science chair Eric Nelson, who oversees the robotics program. The team’s success continued as it won the Roebling Division (for the first time in the team’s history) and proceeded to the elimination rounds, where the winners of each division faced off. Harker and its alliance finished fourth overall, ending a great run for the team!
The upper school robotics team is in Houston this week for the FIRST Championship, which includes teams from more than 60 countries. The team qualified after last month’s second place finish at the Sacramento Regional, held at the University of California, Davis, where it sailed through the seeding rounds into the quarterfinals. After winning a tie breaker to advance to the semifinals, the team had to make spot repairs to their robot’s elevator system to win another tie breaker. While the robot was too damaged to prevail in the finals, second place was enough to secure the team’s trip to Houston. Best of luck!
At the NorCal FIRST Lego League Silicon Valley Championship in late January, a team made up of Harker sixth graders Jordan Labio, Dustin Miao and Kabir Ramzan – known as Alpha Wolves – took first place among the 35 teams at the event. The team’s robot performed exceptionally throughout the competition, scoring the highest two runs (one with 285 points and another with 265) and being the only robot to score more than 200 points on all four of its runs. Competition was fierce, as each team at the tournament had qualified by finishing in the top three at other local events. This win puts Harker’s team in the running to compete against other regional champions from across the world.
The Alpha Wolves’ next event is the Northern California FLL Innovations Expo in March, which the team was invited to attend after presenting a group research project at a previous event in November. Their project was one of 50 selected from 500 entries.
Harker middle school students gave impressive performances at the First Lego League robotics qualifiers on Nov. 19, held at the NASA Ames Research Center. Grade 6 students Kabir Ramzan, Jordan Labio and Dustin Miao – collectively known as “Alpha Wolves” – placed first overall and received the Champion’s Award for robot performance and design, as well as the project they submitted for the FLL Global Innovation Contest, which uses rainwater and irrigation systems to reduce wasteful water usage. The team earned entry into the Global Innovation contest that will take place in March.
Also in the competition were Ramit Goyal and Joe Li, both grade 6, who were members of team “Savage Ninjas.” Their team took second place in the robot performance category, earning an 175 points in the final round, more than any other team at the event. Their project was to develop a method of controlling the use irrigation water by employing moisture sensors, which would save the use of California irrigation water by up to 40%.
Some lower school students had a stellar weekend of competition at the 2017 Tech Challenge, with teams of Harker students taking the top two spots in their grade bracket and a third team with three of four members from Harker winning an award for design process. Fifth graders Reza Jalil, Vardaan Ghai, Veyd Patil and Kyle Leung – known collectively as Team Trespassers – took the first place spot, while Team Arctic Infusion – made up of fifth graders Om Tandon, Jordan Labio, Zachary Blue and Neel Handa – finished second.
Team Huskies – comprising fifth graders Nathan Liu, Adrian Liu and Natasha Rajaram and a fourth member from another school – won an award for Outstanding Engineering Design Process. They were also finalists in the video contest, in which teams created videos outlining the creation of their robots.
The Tech Challenge, which celebrated its 30th anniversary this weekend, had contestants design, build and test a robot over a period of several months with the goal of creating a machine that could traverse the course designed for the contest. More than 2,500 students from grades 4-12 took part in the contest. Congratulations to these outstanding roboticists!