The Clear Creek High School Robotics Team has caught many people’s attention after winning the Lone Star Regionals at Reliant Arena on April 2-3. The team will now advance to the national competition in Atlanta.

In addition to winning first place, Creek’s Robotics team took away the Regional Chairman’s Award, the highest award given out by FIRST Robotics. This is a mentorship award based on the teams’ community outreach. They also won the General Motors Industrial Design Award, and their head NASA engineering mentor won the Woody Flowers Award for Outstanding Mentor. The team also won the Colorado Regional Competition earlier in the year.

The country divides the different robotics team across the nation into large regions; Creek’s team falls into the Lone Star Region, which spans from Oklahoma to Mississippi. To advance to Nationals in Atlanta, the team had to win either first place or the Chairman’s Award. Creek won both.

“Since there are so few robotics teams around the country, we don’t function like other sports by having weekly games, meets, or matches,” said the Robotics team head Engineer and Chairman’s Speaker Kara Boyer. “Teams are allowed to attend as many regionals as they want.”

Each year, in the beginning of January, all the robotics teams around the country are told what the new “game” is for that year’s regionals. This year’s game was stacking triangular pyramids made of PVC pipe, called tetras, on bigger tetras, called goals.

“Every team is only given six weeks to design, build and run their robot before they ship it out to their first competition,” said Kara. “From the time the teams find out about the game, time is of the essence.”

In between ship day and competition, the team begins preparing for the Chairman’s Award competition and practice driving their robot.

At the competitions, the teams are paired up with three other robotics teams to create an “alliance”, who work together to earn points for each round or match of the competition. The teams earned points by scoring as many tetras as possible, either scoring on or under the tetras.

Members of the Creek team are: Brent Salbert (driver), Mason Markee (field chief, Chairman’s speaker), Lulu Cheng, Michael Fernando, Josh Kuhn, Ryan Nye, Ithimar Glumac, Kirk Simmons, and Kara Boyer (chief engineer and Chairman’s Speaker).

Students who are interested in Robotics can see Mrs. Baggerman or Mrs. St. John in B-building.