After victory at Lenape district competition, York County’s robotics team garnered enough points to move on to St. Louis, Missouri to participate in the world championship.

  Robotics isn’t seen as a sport, but the non-profit charity FIRST (logo at right) has set it up like one, creating a worldwide network of competitions and storing $16 million in scholarships for its winners. The volume of teams in FIRST is not grand; participation is expensive, as the task of robot construction would suggest.

  York’s team is Techfire 225, and contains junior Gideon Miles, sophomore Gracie Putnam, junior Jacob Bryant and sophomore Justin Quackenbush of Susquehannock, as well as students from other high schools around the county.

  The competition has ‘bots moving about an arena and slinging discs into a basket– automatically for three minutes and by remote control for two. Each game involves two alliances of three robots– teams from the current top bracket of eight have first pick of alliances. Robots get points from discus scores or from when other robots foul them.

  Techfire 225’s robot breezed through Lenape’s quarterfinals, then lost two games and was eliminated from the finals. Its outstanding record in the quarterfinals, however, secured enough points to send it to the Mid-Atlantic Regionals–against every ‘bot between Baltimore and Manhattan. Here it performed poorly but scored enough points to move on to the ultimate competition.

  Techfire 225 is something to worry about, even amongst the heavy competition according to Miles, the team’s head scout (the man who snoops on other teams to learn the workings of their robots),

  “Our robot is unique in that it is a full-court three-point shooter,” explains Miles. “[It sits] in a corner, firing discs that don’t have a limit…and getting tons of points. It can fire at a ridiculous rate in our corner. There are other full-court shooters out there, but they are just designed to shoot at one value; they don’t have our adjustability.”

  The full-court strategy means York’s team needs a robot with precision, which it has. A missed shot is an unusual occurrence for Techfire’s discus slinger.

  Even though Techfire has prevailed through trials of skill at Lenape and the MAR, this is not enough. Courtesy of the Lunatech 316’s infinite kindness, Techfire’s bussing costs are low, but it still needs $10,000 for food, lodging and transportation in Mound City for a week. Plenty of businesses hope to put themselves in the favor of high-school robotics prodigies, so with a little luck Techfire 225 will get sponsors.

  As Putnam points out, the journey is still worth it even if Techfire never finds scholarships or glory.

  The competition is “an opportunity to work with kids similarly thinking,” says Putnam, “to produce something that works and see how it paid off.”