Innovation and persistence. Picture this: you are given just over six weeks to design, manufacture, and assemble a robot that is as accurate and efficient as possible. It is to outperform its competition by being faster, more maneuverable, and more functional for it’s designed task. Could you do it? Well,  this past weekend at the PNW Clackamas Academy District event in Oregon, Tahoma’s Robotics team, better known as “Bear Metal,” did just that. Bear Metal took home a win with an astonishing 18-0-0 overall record. “We were incredibly fast, in our testing we found that we were going to be one of the fastest robots on the field and that paid off being that we went undefeated, we never lost a match and we ended up winning the competition,” said Robotics member junior Shane Beres.

This years “game challenge” goal as it is called was to get as many ‘milk crate’ like boxes onto your team’s scale in a span of two minutes. The more seconds that your team’s scale outweighs your opponents, the more points you receive. 

So what was their recipe for success? “Our robot was really quick and was able to pick up the cubes from any angle pretty much. We were also able to do pretty much anything on the field that our alliance needed us to do,” said sophomore Zoey Oshiro.

Robotics next competition will be held March 17th and 18th at Auburn Mountainview High School. It is free and open to the public. There will also be a livestream available on the 17th.

Even though the season has just started, Tahoma has positioned itself to be a dominant force during competitions.