The robotics team, Impact, placed in two regional competitions, qualified to and competed in the State District Championships, concluding one of the most successful seasons in the team’s history.

Impact placed 4th at the FIT District Houston competition on March 20 to March 22, 5th at the FIT Space City competition on March 28 to March 30, and 20th at State District Championships on April 2 to April 5. This year’s newly-introduced game format was called Reefscape, where multiple robotics teams were divided into two alliances per match and scored points by placing “coral” and harvesting “algae” from a “reef” in a two minute and 30 second match.

“For the pipe reef, you could put coral at level two, three and four,” senior and co-captain Dylan Wang said.“What that inevitably led to was the vast majority of the bots [being] really tall. They looked really impressive, but they were easy to tip over. It really pushed us to the limits because we had to make a mechanically challenging and complex machine.”

Impact was the captain of alliances third and four in the FIT District Houston and Friendswood competition. In total, they earned 64 district points, 55 of which were needed to advance to the District Championship.

“I think if you polled any member in our team, almost all of them would say that this year has been the best year we’ve had,” Wang said. “Things are gonna break during competition, but you have to be prepared for stuff to go wrong. You can’t get too complacent in robotics. It’s never over until it is over.”

Seniors Pranay Prassi and Andy Shen drove the bot for most of the match, but in the first 15 seconds, all teams have their robots on autonomous mode. During this time, robots move according to pre-programmed directions.

“The [autonomous mode] is important because it gives us a lot more points,” Prassi said. “The points are worth more because the program runs the robot by itself. The majority of driving isn’t that bad, but the cage [and] the small movements are the hard part because we have to drive the robot really fast.”

Impact relied on senior Samuel Deng to scout out other teams’ field performances. Deng’s role helps gather data when forming alliances for playoff matches after qualification matches.

“We will scout to determine the capabilities of each team and their robot,” Deng said. “We’ll collect quantitative data on how many points they’re scoring per match. We’ll also collect qualitative data about how well the robot is built and functions. Is it consistent? Does it run into issues? Will it break down in the middle of matches?”

Freshman Lucas Nanny joined in scouting other robots at competitions. Although he has been involved in robotics since middle school, he learned new skills through FRC.

“Attending the preseason, I learned how to wire,” Nanny said. “In middle school, I did Vex, but with FRC, I get to build things that are way more hands-on than Vex.”

This year, Impact held pre-season meets to help teach and engage new students and returning members in designing and planning the official season out starting, Jan. 24. Officers like Wang created over five hours of content for a programming course during the summer and continued to teach new members skills like wiring as the school year started.

“This year was the first year where we did significant work during preseason,” Wang said. “During the school year, we had meetings every week starting in mid-September. We had build sessions where we taught new members how to use tools, the drill press, band saw, chop saw, all the tools that we needed to build a robot. We had prior knowledge of how to work with a swerve drive, and that was really useful.”

This is Wang’s last competition season, but he is hopeful for the future of the team.

“What I enjoy most about competing at State is the atmosphere,” Wang said. “You might not know it, but there’s a future NASA astronaut in that crowd. There [are] future engineers that are going to end up building the world in a few decades. Seeing the solutions that people come up with in this game, seeing some of them fail and some of them work is the process of engineering coming into play.”

To learn more about team Impact, join its Remind @bhs2585.