BHS Robotics Team comes out on top

With a little bit of luck, the Bloomfield High School Robotics Team managed a small miracle March 14 and 15 in a regional robotics contest at Seneca High School.

It happened at the Lego-sponsored First Mid-Atlantic FLL Regional Competition which involved 30 schools from New Jersey, Pennsylvania., and Massachusetts. It was realized when the three-team alliance in which BHS competed in the final match won. Some miracles, however, do not come easily.

The competition requires a team to build a robot equipped with sensors, capable of acting on its own as well as taking commands. The robot or bot is programmed for a given task. The competition this year required it to race around and collect melon-sized balls and launch them into a bin while avoiding an opposing team’s defending bots. The event is held on a gymnasium floor with students and team advisors on the sidelines.

“The first day wasn’t the best for us,” said team member Jake Lo. “We had a lot of errors with the bot and it caused us to be in last place at the end of the day.”

The team had rushed to make the robot, he said, and consequently some things did not work or were unfinished. The robot had initially been programmed to be basically a shooting robot.

Day Number 1 was spent in qualifying matches, three robots from three schools against three other robots and schools. But crucially, at these competitions, the three-member teams or alliances are not constant. For succeeding qualifying matches, schools are randomly regrouped.

“I didn’t even want to go to the competition the last day,” Jake continued. “We’ve had this experience before. But we didn’t have the luck.”

March 15, Day Number 2, there were four qualifying matches and the finals. The BHS bot was not collecting the balls and shooting them quickly enough. Jake said the only thing it could do effectively was move along the floor. That is when the team decided their bot should accentuate the positive and mostly play defense for their respective alliances. It could still shoot, just not very good. But the team captain, Taylor Anthony, had also reconfigured the bot’s ability to collect and shoot the balls more quickly.

“We actually won all four matches on the second day,” Jake said.

Adding up their alliance points, BHS moved into last place just above the cut off point. From the remaining teams, the top-seeded teams would choose their alliance partners for the finals. But more teams make the cut than get picked for the finals.

“Good offensive teams get picked first, then the defensive teams,” Jake said. “We were showing off our defensive abilities. It was about the only way we’d get picked. After the qualification matches, you’re ranked. The top teams get to pick. It was stressful waiting. But we were the last team to be picked for an alliance.”

But importantly, over the course of the day the students are all talking to each other, so public relations plays a part, too.

“The fact that we got picked was a miracle,” Taylor said. “We were just a defensive team. That’s incredibly important, but you don’t want to go into a competition just as a defensive team. But we were able to shut down our opponents so we turned the situation around into something good.”

BHS robotics teacher and team co-advisor Lauren Bsales said the Seneca experience went super well.

”It was good to see the kids work under pressure,” she said. “They were in last place, but they kept calm.”