WEISER On Friday, a team of freshmen from Caldwell High School earned the top prize in a regional robotics tournament and a chance to compete in the upcoming state championship.

The tournament, made up of 38 middle school and high school teams, tasked students with designing and building a robot that can compete against other teams in a game-based engineering challenge.

The Caldwell High School senior team won the excellence award for the best overall robot design and student achievement.

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Coach Dennis Zattiero, who teaches pre-engineering at Caldwell High School, said this years victory is in keeping with tradition. He said the school has competed in the world championships three of the last four years.

The thing I find most interesting, is that the teams dont get the pieces to build their robot until the beginning of the school year, Zattiero said.

When they do receive the parts, students often devote up to 200 hours into building the robot, essentially from scratch.

The most unique thing about the competition, Zattiero said, is that students must take the knowledge they have learned in school and apply it to building their robot. The games are what he calls discovery-based learning, which allows students the time they need to work through the issues they face in a real-world setting. The process is difficult, however, and teams are often unable to complete their robot or make it operational.

Once completed, the robot is used to compete in 10 rounds of one-on-one strategy-based tasks. There are three separate tasks teams must complete in the span of two minutes.

The first task teams complete in that time frame is programming their robot to autonomously pick up foam jacks and move them over a fixed wall. The next phase involves putting as many jacks over the wall as possible with an opponent defending the other side with their robot. For the final task, the robot must grab to a certain point on a wooden post and lift itself as high as it can. Many teams dont get to this point due to its difficulty, Zattiero said.

Two minutes doesnt seem like much time, he said. But once the match starts it seems like forever because they have so much to do.

Tournaments are held year-round at the regional, state, and national levels, with local champions going on to compete against the best in the world at VEX World championships in April. The competitions are sponsored by the Robotics Education and Competition Foundation, a Texas-based organization dedicated to inspiring science and technology learning.

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Freshman Caldwell team takes first place in Regional Robotics Tournament - Idaho Press-Tribune