Local high school robotics team supporting teams citywide
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - Earlier this week a local Philadelphia robotics team won a prestigious competition in Houston. On this week's Focusing on the Future Wakisha Bailey speaks with the team and finds out how they are making a difference with other high schoolers.
Matt, Lilly, Maja and Iris, are part of Central High School's robotics team, "The Robolancers."
After winning the 2023 FIRST Impact Award at a robotics competition in Houston, this group is all smiles.
"It's a big opportunity to represent our city," 10th grader Lily Sands said.
"People care about the work we do. It completely blew my mind that we even got further than our first district competition," 10th grader Iris Mccleary said.
This year the team competed in four events, two were district qualifiers. Below is a photo from the first mid-Atlantic event in Bensalem.
"Every year we get a new game, and it comes with a whole new field and ways you can score with your robot so this year for example we scored cones and cubes, you had to make a grabber mechanism or an arm mechanism," junior Matthew Perlman said.
The team's robot is Lucie the Goose.
"Let's make this robot look like a goose in the way that we build it," Maja said.
"It's a lot of fun to have a random theme that everyone could hop on to," Sand said.
The team's national success is due to the impact they continue to have on local robotic teams across the city through the Philadelphia Robotics Coalition.
"We support teams throughout Philadelphia, nationally, and we have students that go and mentor those teams," Mccleary said.
"We support 131 teams citywide and that means financially, sending mentorship, that means they come to our events," Sand said.
This is Maja's last year in high school. She hopes future Robolancers will continue to make a difference in Philadelphia.
"I'm really going to miss the people on this team it's been great spending all this time with them and working and collaborating to not only build robots but our mission and our impact across the city," Maja said.