Going into the 28-team event, we were nervous. We had just returned from break and had only one week to finalize and prepare our robot for the qualifier.

After a long day of five matches, we finished as the #9 team. As the finals began, the top four teams selected partners to join them in the final round. Unfortunately, we were not picked. However, the judges who visited and interviewed all the teams were impressed with our clever and robust design for collecting objects and moving them to the baskets to score points. As a result, we won the Design Award, propelling us to the state-level competition.

The driving team—Wyatt, Zachary, Colton, and Ian—did a remarkable job connecting with allies, analyzing opponents' strategies, and figuring out how to outmaneuver them. Meanwhile, Bell and Diego performed crucial adjustments to the robot at the start of the day, ensuring we were ready to compete.

When our code needed fine-tuning, Anna and James stepped up, fixing bugs and optimizing our programming to help us score more points each match. They also collaborated with our allies, tweaking their code to maximize their scoring potential beyond what they had achieved before.