Gearing Things Up: The Robotics Team Brings Home a Win
January 28, 2022
Intelligence, cooperativeness, and an enormous amount of creativity are just a few of the amazing characteristics that are possessed by all of the members of the PPCHS robotics team. These skills definitely played a major role when it came to recently securing their big win in their most recent robotics competition.
Over the previous three-day weekend, the PPCHS robotics team, The Department of Microwave Repair, brought home two trophies after competing against other schools in the VEX Robotics Competition in USF in Tampa.
Students Matthew Estevez, Jonathan Kim, Nathan Pothuganti, Nikhil Sangamkar, Aidan Cobb, and Eduardo Steinmann Petrasso are the underclassmen that make up the team and were able to bring back those two trophies: one of them being in “Design”, and the other in “Robot Skills Champion.”
“There’s a lot of different things that go into the making of a robot,” says Nikhil. “There’s a lot of thought involved in the robot, so the whole process is pretty complicated.”
It takes the team a few months to complete a robot, and there’s a lot of time and effort that gets put into it.
“I had been in the lab since 9 in the morning and left at 9 at night that Friday, so I was pretty excited that I didn’t spend twelve hours in the lab for nothing,” expresses Jonathan.
These talented few also managed to place in the Semifinals Alliance Competition, and are now ranked seventh in the state!
As a team, they all worked together based on their own separate strengths. Matthew was the most proficient at driving the robot, Aidan was the most efficient builder, Jonathan’s previous experience allowed him to become the team’s main programmer, with the help of Eduardo, and Nathan and Nikhil were in charge of the notebook.
Matthew, the team leader, proudly states that the teamwork as a whole is extremely strong. “Literally everyone contributes, and that almost never happens,” he says.
“We got far. We had never done an alliance competition before, but we got to the semifinals so we were super proud of that. We completely won the individual bracket too, so we were also super proud of that” the team says. To celebrate their hard earned win, the team decided to have dinner together at Chili’s.
“We really enjoy working together, it’s a lot of time spent with friends,” Eduardo says.
Overall, the team’s hard work and dedication to their craft and to one another helped them to pull through in the end. Congratulations to Matthew, Aidan, Jonathan, Nathan, Nikhil, and Eduardo on their accomplishments!
