BY Susana Kuehne Contributing Writer
Saturday, May 19th, the Becker Robotics team, C.I.S. (Coalition of Independent Students) 4607, attended the FIRST Robotics State Championship in Minneapolis at the University of Minnesota. They were ranked 24 out of 36 teams but believe they performed the best they could with their style of robot.
“There was a good mix of robot designs at this state competition—some of which we hadn’t seen when we played at the World Championship,” said Ben Fischbach. “I think this made for a very tough competition, but our robot still did well, given the circumstances, and we wouldn’t have done anything differently”.
Becker also won the Dunwoody College of Technology Engineering Award at States, which includes a $500 prize. This award is based on a team’s robot design and how successfully students adapted to or resolved engineering struggles throughout the season.
In 2018, there are about 218 teams competing in the country, compared to the mere six that existed in 2006. As robotics becomes more popular, Becker continues to stay on top of their game. The students had an amazing run for the 2017 to 2018 year, taking home five blue banners and six awards. In fact, this is what the refer to as their ‘reset season’ due to the fact that many seniors graduated and left the team last year, prompting this year’s group to recruit new members and train them.
“This has actually been our best season ever, and next year we will be expanding even more. We also hope to be more intentional about reorganizing our departments to include higher levels of efficiency within our leadership positions—which will in turn allow the group to run more efficiently as well,” commented Dylan Cheney.
Over the summer, C.I.S. 4607 will be working on a few off-season events and developing projects to strengthen their design process for experimental purposes. They also plan to grow the younger student programs (middle and intermediate ages).
