Under the bright lights of the San Francisco regional tournament, packed bleachers cheered as 41 robots competed head to head, shooting across the busy arena. From Saturday, March 22 to Sunday, March 23, Los Altos High School’s robotics team placed high at the tournament — third out of 41 teams. However, the team did not qualify for the FIRST Championships, bringing their season to an early conclusion. 

Coming into the season, the Robotics team had lost half their seniors, leaving the class with mostly inexperienced members. After the first competition of this season — where they didn’t make it into elimination rounds, this tournament was a huge improvement .

The team had to completely start from scratch, due to errors with their original design. With only three weeks to build a new robot, some members were skeptical of their chances at success. The team switched coding languages from C++ to Java for the first time in school history, as they could no longer afford to be dependent on alumni to help with a previously used custom code. The switch allowed them to code more effectively and use the same language as most other teams.

“I thought it was a bad idea, because our big problem with the last competition was that we hadn’t given our coders enough time, and now we were giving them even less time,” prototyping lead junior Zoe Cheng said. “But after the first day or so, it seemed a lot more feasible.”

“We are hoping that this was a great example of what the team can do in a very small window and really intense time crunch, but is something that never has to happen again,” Robotics adviser teacher Stephen Hine said.

The robot — dubbed Theseus — jumped through the standings, advancing from 20th to third in one day.

“As the elimination round started, we began beating these really good teams,” Robotics captain senior Raj Virginkar said. “We were scoring really high and our robot was working perfectly.”

The turning point in the competition was forming an alliance with Palo Alto Youth Robotics’ team 6036. During the competition, the top eight teams are allowed to form alliances with two other teams. The robotics team didn’t get the opportunity to do so, but because of their high performance, they were picked by one of the best teams in the league. 

“That was a really good moment,” Raj said. “We really thought that we had a chance to win the whole competition.

Regardless of the outcomes of the competition, many on the robotics team were happy with the season overall. Though the team did not fully live up to their achievements of last year, where they won regionals and made it to the championships, many were proud of their progress and lessons learnt. 

“I was really hoping that we could have gone further, but I think I’m just very proud of everyone who worked on the robot,” sophomore Rayhan Merchant said. “I’m grateful that we had a great season and learned a lot throughout.”

“It was really sad, especially for all the seniors, because it was our last match ever,” Raj said. “But we were really proud that we got to be one of the best teams at this competition.”