The Texas High TBOTS club members traveled on the weekend of Feb. 3 to Nevada, Texas for the clubs first robotic competition. The members were given certain tasks to complete so they can move forward in the competition.

“We inspect the robot provided to us and make sure it’s safe to play on the field,” Senior Karissa Smith said. “There are seven matches per team and they’re quick; the thing about [the matches] is that they happen so closely together that once you finish one match and something is wrong with the robot then you’ll hardly have anytime to fix it before your next match so it’s a very tight time limit.”

Commitment and time management are both key components to reach their goals that they have set for themselves individually and team wise.

“[The judges] set us up in certain rounds out of 44 rounds, and at the end they would place us, based on our performances, in what place we made and we achieved tenth place out of 26,” Junior Victor Camacho said. “After that we choose our alliances for the qualifying rounds but when our alliance came up for the first round we failed.”

TBOTS is a great opportunity for students that want to get a hands-on experience with robotics and would like to pursue a career in the STEM pathway.

“Back in middle school, my brother was in robotics and he would go to these meetings after school and I learned what he does and all the creativity he uses and the skills meant for that kind of challenge, it excited me,” Camacho said. “I thought that it would be a good learning experience and that it would benefit my career and future.”

Although they did not reach their intended target in the finals, they hope to improve for the next upcoming competition.

“We plan to work on just small components skills; how do you lift, how do you drive, try to improve programming skills. This was our first year doing this type of robotics [competition] so it’s a big learning curve for everybody,” TBOTS sponsor Nicole Ayers.