Whitefish Bay High School travels to international robotics competition

A small team from Whitefish Bay High School will compete on the international stage to hopefully bring robotics glory to Wisconsin.

Bay Robotics is a team from Whitefish Bay High School. From April 17th to the 20th, they will compete in Houston against schools from across the world in the FIRST competition. FIRST is an organization that promotes youth STEM education . There are three categories of competition: FIRST Technical Challenge, FIRST Robotics Challenge, and FIRST LEGO League.

Bay Robotics hopes to be the first team from Wisconsin to bring home the title in the FIRST Technical Challenge competition.

“We want to show that Wisconsin is the state where robotics teams are coming from. Where we have these engineers who are ready to tackle the challenges of the world," junior Dillon Buckley said.

Essentially, the FIRST Technical Challenge requires teams build a robot that picks up hexagonal hockey puck-esque pieces and stack them on the board as fast and high as possible in two and a half minutes. Teams are given points for height and matching certain colors together. For the first few seconds seconds of the challenge, the robot must operate autonomously.

James Groh

“It’s kind of supposed to mimic what companies in the industry will want there for like Amazon moving packages around or other sort of industrial tasks like that.”

The team spent thousands of hours coding, designing, and engineering this robot.

“This robot runs on 5,000 lines of java code done by our students," head coach Sergio Lemaitre said.

Beyond the robot’s performance, teams are also judged on their community involvement including spreading STEM education to elementary and middle schoolers, interacting with engineering companies, and fundraising.

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"We are running this like a small tech company. And the experience that the students get here by designing by themselves a full functioning robot and also being exposed to how companies work out there in the field, this is an experience that doesn't exist - the school doesn't offer that," Coach Lemaitre

Bay Robotics has already won the state championship. Now, they hope to conquer the world.

However, they aren’t the only team from Wisconsin in the competition. Two teams from Brookfield will compete in the FIRST Technical Challenge. Teams from Nicolet, Marquette University High School and Divine Savior, Oak Creek, and Mukwonago are entered in the FIRST Robotics Challenge.

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