On Sat., March 2, all three BHS robotics teams attended the State Championship at Bakersfield College.

This is only the second time in Burroughs’ history that all robotics teams have qualified for state-level competition (the Burros also qualified all three teams last year).

This competition was the most important of the whole year, as teams who met certain criteria would qualifiy for the Vex Robotics World Championship in Dallas later this spring.

Teams may qualify to advance in multiple ways, but the main ways are to win certain awards from extensive judging or making it to the final match. With this in mind, all teams from BHS Robotics came to the State competition with strategies to achieve these goals.

“Going into the match our strategy was to play defensive,” said sophomore Will Horning, a builder for Team 7422H. “Not too defensive, though, because we wanted to be able to score points.”

As the match went on, the teams had to make changes along the way to fix the issues with their bots and adapt to different play styles of other teams.

“Some of my team’s changes along the matches were to replace the motor we discovered to be broken,” said Horning. “However, we only figured out it was the motor after two matches during which we could not move at all.”

Overall, the teams all did very well, with each of them making it into the playoff matches, but falling just short of qualifying for world.

The most successful performance was by the freshman team, which made it to the semifinal round.

The freshman team included Zachary Duchow (captain); Shelomith Azzoni and Meghan Yeager (notebook); Mason Turner (programmer); Everett Dickey, Colin McElwain, and James Bake (builders).