Menlo robotics team wins the “Judge’s Choice Award” at the NorCal Botball tournament over this past weekend. Photo courtesy of Sally Li.

By Kaitlyn Tom

Last Saturday, April 16th, the Menlo Botball Team competed at the NorCal Botball Tournament at the NASA Ames Conference Center. The team consisted of juniors Lauren Yang, Aaron Brown, and Bradford Seipp, sophomores Atreya Iyer, Chloe Miranz, and Tommy Yang, and freshmen Arushi Sahai and John Kim. The Yang siblings are co-captains.

Botball is a competition where students program and build fully autonomous robots.

Menlo’s Botball team won the “Judge’s Choice Award” at the tournament, which is awarded to a team who did something that made them stand out from the others. Menlo’s team was awarded this prize for introducing new people at Menlo to Botball and teaching them robotics.

This year, teams were required to build robots that could perform a variety of actions, such as picking up pom-poms from a table and placing them into bins and dragging cubes back to a designated area.

The Menlo team prepared two robots for the competition and taught all members of the team to program in C++. “The best experience was learning more about the software coding and installing the hardware of the robot,” sophomore Chloe Miranz, who is new to robotics, said.

During the preparation, members of the team also learned the value of teamwork. “It’s really important to work as a team and [to] collaborate with everyone else,” Miranz said.

Because of the complex programming language, the team was almost disqualified from the tournament. “We changed the code the night before the tournament […] and it turned out that that change [in the code] disqualified us [for a match],” sophomore Atreya Iyer said. The team quickly fixed the problem between matches and was able to continue on in the tournament.

One of the challenges that the team faced was finding a time where the new members could learn the programming language. “A lot of our team members were busy with other extracurriculars, so it was hard to find a time when we could all meet,” co-captain sophomore Tommy Yang said.

The team overcame this challenge by staying on top of their schedule. “I [made] sure [that] everyone was working and helped others when they didn’t understand how to build or program something,” Yang said.

This tournament concludes this year’s Botball season.