Dos Pueblos High School Robotics Team “Gears Up” for World Robotics Competition

GOLETA, Calif.— One local high school is “gearing up” for next week’s world robotics competition.

The Dos Pueblos High School robotics team only had eight weeks to design a robot for the regional first robotics competition.

These high schoolers call themselves the “Octobots.” They just won second place in the Regional First Robotics Competition.

“I feel a lot of joy when I see the robot working because it's like, wow, we only did this in like eight weeks and it's working really well. And we're like one of the top teams,” said third year student Sierra Rose Thompson.

This is their first year competing. They were also the youngest team at the competition and the only team to walk away with the coveted rookie all-star award.

Now, they’re advancing to the world competition, where they will be competing with teams from 51 countries.

“Next week, we'll be heading to Houston if we have fundraised enough. And we will compete against 623 other high schools for the World Championship, said Chief Mentor for the team Michael Ramsey.

This collaborative group has learned everything from design, coding, engineering, finance, and communication through this competition.

They even learned how to deal with setbacks along the way.

“We rewired and like organized all the wires on the robot, which took many hours…We realize some designs weren't compatible with how we had built our robot, so we had to kind of change the design to fit the rules of the game And then also with the shape of the robot we built,” said Thompson.

The robotics team is currently seeking funding to help offset the costs associated with traveling to this world competition.

“Even though we qualified for Houston. It was a great feeling, but we also realized that we do need more funding, so it's just been a lot. We've been trying to apply for a bunch of grants,” said Lisi.

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