Congratulations to our Middle School Robotics teams! On Saturday, February 4, at Chatsworth High School, two of the Middle School Patriots Robotics teams qualified for State Championships, winning a total of four awards: Team 66X (Eden Katz’27, Saige Kumar ’27, and Fiona Pan ’27) won the Skills Award and the Design Award, while Team 66Z (Myron Lai ’27, Lucas Argano-Rush ’27, and Aiden Go ’27) won the Teamwork Champion Award and the Excellence Award.

Team 88x (Justin Zhao ’28 and Noah Ladin ’29) and team 88D (Keith Halcovich ’29 and Johnny Robinson ’29) also made it to the finals round at the same competition.

The six Viewpoint teams competed alongside 11 others from local schools. Teams compete as “alliance partners” and work together to score points in the game. The students started working on their robots in the fall and have gone to several competitions since December. After each competition, the robots were redesigned or modified to improve their performance in future competitions. This year’s game is called “Slapshot” and involves releasing and collecting discs from different dispensers and shooting them into goal zones. The robots also can release an expansion arm at the end of the match that reaches into the goal zone, doubling the points of the discs in that point zone.

 Robotics Coach Michael Lombardi was so proud of all six teams. He said:

“The teams demonstrated admirable dedication and have worked incredibly hard since the fall, often spending extra time outside of their regular club meetings to work on their robots. Each competition allows them the chance to not only to test their current design, but evaluate other designs and approaches that they may want to include in their next iteration. This past Saturday was our last official competition of the season, so the excitement was even higher than usual. The teams have been running practice matches in the classroom and constantly finding ways to improve their score either through modifications in design or strategy. They should be incredibly proud with the payout from all their hard work. Their success was earned slowly through many hours of building, testing, and practicing, and it was amazing to see their work pay off.”