Thousands of supporters and fans of robots, some with painted faces and posters, flocked to Boston University’s Agganis Arena Friday and Saturday to root for 44 teams participating in the “For Inspiration ‘ Recognition of Science and Technology” Robotics basketball competition.
Boston University Academy’s team reached the regional quarterfinals and winning the Johnson ‘ Johnson Sportsmanship Award, but was unable to advance to the national championship during the regional competition.
“It’s the best our team has ever done,” head coach and lead mentor Gary Garber said. “Our team has never made it into the quarterfinals before at a regional competition, and this is the first time our team has ever gotten an award at a regional competition.”
The FIRST Robotics competition is an international event that gets together amateur high school engineers, college students and professional mentors to build robots that compete in a game that FIRST reinvents annually.
Science-lovers and robot-builders from 43 high schools across the east coast and a single team from Brazil lit up Agganis Arena with a nonstop festive atmosphere full of dance, chants and passionate robot sports fans.
Each high school team consisted of an average of 25 students and a dozen mentors, all of which wore matching costumes relevant to the team’s theme. The rowdiest of them brought team mascots, flags and banners.
For the Academy’s seventh year competing, team Overclocked wore the white and red BU colors and brought a healthy home crowd of parents and students to support them. Garber said he was pleased with the 150 students that came to support the BU team.
“We cancelled classes and brought the entire school here,” Garber, a BU Academy instructor, said.
At a third of its capacity, the Agganis Arena was split in half to accommodate the 44 teams’ robots on one side and a small basketball court for robots on the other.
Each match consisted of two alliances of three teams. Every team had its own robot for the 3-on-3 basketball-style match that lasted two minutes and 10 seconds. Each robot was guided by students operating the robots from a distance and following a different strategy to attack one of the three goals on each side of the court. The hoop in the middle was worth three points and the side goals a single point.
Overclocked’s robot was specially designed with that three-point hoop in mind.
“We always go for the three-point center goal because it is worth so many more points, and we can do it pretty consistently,” BU Academy junior Alexandra Schultz said.
Prior to Saturday’s matches, Schultz said the team motto, “Reverse the curse,” was uncalled for. She said it was not a curse that kept them from performing well in their previous outings, but technical problems.
During the first matches of the qualifying rounds, its robot and strategy worked well, propelling the team to reach the regional quarterfinals and to a few dominating performances.
The down note came in Saturday’s two regional quarterfinal matches when Overclocked had a streak of bad luck, or perhaps a Boston curse on their side.
In the first match, the robot suffered a “top-roll jam” in which the balls got stuck inside the mechanism that fed them into the shooter.
During the second match, the BU Academy crowd was more excited, chanting “two-four-six” in reference to their team number. However, the robot was accidentally tipped over by another competing robot during the match.
“We had some problems with our robot,” BU Academy sophomore Dana Neel said. “It wasn’t our strategy.”
Regardless of the outcome, students said they felt proud of what they accomplished in the months of work they put into this competition, and of their record of five wins and five losses in the qualifying rounds.
Neel said the best experience of the competition was when Overclocked pulled off a lopsided victory Friday with a score of 116-0 in front of the BU Academy crowd.
“I really like to see, with our robot and with alliance partners, when we would set up a strategy and it would just work,” Programming Captain and BU Academy student Drew Macrae said. “The 116-0 was an example of this.”
The biggest winner of the day was the team from Provincia de Sao Pedro High School. The Brazilians won the Regional Chairman’s Award, the highest honor awarded in this competition, for “inspiring greater levels of respect and honor for science and technology,” and a seat at the national championship competition.
Organizers of the event said they were pleased with the accommodations BU and the city of Boston provided, saying that “Boston delivered.” BU is one of the main sponsors of this regional competition and of the Overclocked team.
The FIRST Robotics competition, that began in 1989 in a small high school gymnasium in New Hampshire, continues its 2006 season in Tel Aviv, Israel with its next regional event.
The season ends in April at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, where 8,500 students from 340 teams meet for the national championship.