Three teams of teens from the Los Altos Community Botball program placed in the top 10 at this year’s International Botball Tournament, which featured 49 teams from around the world, including China, Australia and Austria.
Team LACT 0399 placed first overall, while LACT 328 and LACT 329 finished ninth and 10th, respectively at the event, held July 8-12 at the Global Conference on Educational Robotics in Norman, Oklahoma.
Each local team included five to 10 high school students from Los Altos and nearby cities such as Los Altos Hills, Palo Alto and Menlo Park.
“We worked really hard (when we met as a team), basically every night and also in the afternoons once it led up to the competition,” said Kathleen Xie, co-captain of LACT 0399. “Fine-tuning is where we’re spending hours and hours every day just running each robot and finding areas where it might fail, or areas that we can improve on to make sure the competition, we know that the robot can stay consistent throughout the competition.”
Xie, a Pinewood School graduate bound for Stanford University, added that the autonomous robotics competition includes three rounds: seeding, double seeding and double elimination.
“Each round lasts two minutes, and the robots move autonomously without remote control,” Xie said. “The goal is to score as many points as possible while strategically navigating the game board.”
Each year, the competition features a new game board theme that requires robots to complete specific tasks, Xie added. This year’s theme was cooking with robots assigned tasks like preparing meals and drinks.
In this year’s challenge, one of the robots collected “ice” (represented by pom-poms) and “drinks” (small PVC pipes), while the other gathered bottles, condiment sets and a “potato” to place in a designated fryer, according to Xie.
The teams had just one month to prepare, spending frequent meetings fine-tuning and coordinating their robots ahead of the international tournament, said Alan Gao, a rising senior at Harker School and co-captain of LACT 0399.
Both Gao and Xie described this year’s tournament as especially competitive, with the top teams posting similar scores.
“It was really intense,” Xie said. “It came down to who could consistently score the most points.”
Despite the pressure, Gao said LACT 399’s success came down to how well the team members worked together.
“Our results wouldn’t have been possible without teamwork,” he said. “Each member had a specific role … whether it was building, coding, designing or handling documentation.”
The Los Altos Community Botball program is a donation- and volunteer-led organization coordinated by Michael Schuh, who helps guide students and provide resources for building and programming.
“The program gives students opportunities to engage in open-ended problem solving,” Shuh said. “It encourages creativity and critical thinking – robotics is a big part of that,” Schuh said.
To apply for the program, visit tinyurl.com/wzy4zd2z for the pdf. For more information, visit boardsailor.com/botball.
