John Kullerstrand

SPARKS FLY Trimming bolts, sophomore Carter Young uses an angle grinder on the frame of the team’s newly redesigned robot. The bolts had to be trimmed down due to being too long, a factor that would be a potential hazard. “The bolts were sticking out of the frame,” Young said. “So we had to grind them down to size to mitigate potential wire-snagging or injury.”

Robotics finished fifth at their competition at Penn High School on Feb. 27, and are heading to their next competition this weekend in Lafayette. At each competition, the robotics team is eligible for an “alliance,” with neighboring schools from Crown point to Hammond.

“You can either get chosen for defense reasons or offense reasons to help them get high placings on the competitions, and we were chosen for defense,” sophomore Adrian Monroy said.

This year, the team has struggled with funding, but has been working on fundraising using methods such as selling coffee to the community, as well as senior president Anastasia Savic going to the statehouse for funding.

“Our team is doing very well at overcoming and adapting this year,” junior Amelia Rzeznikowski said. “The Reefscape challenge this year is one of the most precision-demanding challenges FRC has ever released, and our team is doing quite well at working around that by redesigning and improving our moving parts to remove points of failure.”

The committees of the robotics team, like engineering, programming and funding, are decided using a survey and opinion of the people in charge of them. Although previous experience in those committees can help, the members of the robotics team are not required to have it before applying for a certain committee.

“My friend Carter was on the programming committee last year and he didn’t know how to program in Java, but he learned along the way throughout the season,” Rzeznikowski said. “Since it’s my first year in robotics, I’m looking forward to learning more about different ways the robot can function to accomplish its tasks, as well as how the general competitions play out.”

This year, the team hopes to fix their problems with funding and make competitions more affordable, but they are also looking forward to their competitions getting in full swing.

“We’re shooting for the stars,” Rzeznikowski said. “We hope to advance to state and do well there to move on to worlds in Texas. We’re pretty confident in our redesigns for the upcoming Lafayette districts and the robot will only continue to get better and better every competition.”