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Reborn team members Danny Lee, Thom Pham and Andy Nguyen work on their robot between competition rounds.

After two competitions, robotics teams Dynamo, Frostbyte and Reborn have earned a total of nine awards collectively. Dynamo and Reborn were named as Tournament Champions in both competitions.

The teams competed January 9 and 30 at the Hudson Robotics Tournaments. Tournament participants were restricted to Garland ISD schools to limit the number of people because of COVID.

The competitions are not the only challenge team members are dealing with this year. They have also had to get creative in working on their robots and coordinating between face to face and virtual students.

“One member from one team works on the robot while others watch online via Google Meet.” robotics team coach Randy Scrudder said. “The students pass the robot off to another, and it goes through a cleaning process.”

This year competitors are challenged with a game called “Change Up.” Players are required to design a robot that can move balls into “hoop-like” goals that are placed across a 12 by 12 foot playing field.

The objective of the game is to earn points by scoring a goal using a ball that corresponds to the team’s color. Robots can remove opponent’s balls from goals as well making the game more challenging.

Team Dynamo is composed of freshmen Key Furr, Ayden Leonard, Ryan Nguyen and Travis Rehmeyer. At the second tournament, they earned the Excellence Award, one of the highest honors in the robotics competition.

The Excellence Award is earned based on how well a team uses their robot in the competition, the levels of improvement the team makes to their robot, and how detailed the recorded progress is in their journal notebooks.

“Our notebook discusses the struggles and obstacles we encountered while optimizing our robot,” Nguyen said. “Our optimizations include a custom-cut and uniquely shaped poly-carbonate funnel for more efficient intake of the balls. All our efforts paid off, and we are proud of winning this award. We cannot take it for granted.”

Reborn is composed of junior Sophie Lee, seniors Andy Nguyen, Thom Pham, Mitchell Shinn and Alan Tran. According to Pham, members of Reborn stand out from the rest as they have been participating in robotics tournaments since middle school.

“Reborn and the other teams deserved the awards. We put many hours of thinking and planning in all of our works,” Pham said. “My team is very dependable, and we have strong work ethics. We treat each other like a family.”

Frostbyte is composed of sophomores Daniel Brzostowski and Kaden Nguyen, junior Danh Nguyen and senior Iliana Aguilar. Frostbyte won the Excellence Award at the first tournament.

“It is important for us to have a mindset of not giving up easily. There is a chance that we can lose all your matches in a competition or have something broken in our robot,” Brzostowski said. “If we let that get to us, then we are missing the chance to improve our robots and be better and stronger.”

A fourth team was added to the roster and competed at the second tournament. Team Hubble is composed of sophomores Noah Hickman, Hawke Ratliff and Samuel Solis. Hubble was able to place seventh in the ranking.

“Our team was rushed, and we didn’t have that much time to prepare because of COVID. Our meetings were limited as well,” Hickman said. “To better prepare for next tournaments, our programmer, Samuel, is learning advanced programming skills, and we are planning on tweaking our robot to better impress the judges.”

Scrudder said that the teams are very independent, and he does not have to coach the students very much. He also said that the teams figure out how to solve problems on their own with little guidance from him.

“I am relieved that we actually got to go to an event, and I am very ecstatic that the teams won awards,” Scrudder said. “I am blessed to be working with these kids, and I am blessed to be associated with the robotics program here at the school.”