Recently Mitty fielded a team at an event not too many may have heard of--the FIRST Robotics Competition. FIRST stands for "For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology," and it holds yearly competitions in which schools across the world are challenged to create a robot to compete in the annual games. this year was Mitty's first year to enter a team in the competition, and the results were outstanding.

Before mid-January no one knew what the competition for hte year was or how one would go about building a robot to perform the required tasks. Form that point the teams had a mere six weeks to design, construct, and (hopefully) test a robot that could herd balls throughout an arena, find its way around with no user input, put huge balls on top of four and nine foot pedestals, and hang itself form a horizontal bar ten feet in the air. The robot does all this with three other robots on the field, two opponents, and one ally with whom the team has had no contact prior to the team.

For the Mitty robotics team, that meant being down in the physics lab working with pen, paper, and power tools long into the night, school nights and weekends alike.

After a string of power outages, the team finished up its building period with a few nights downstairs until midnight in the few days prior to the ship-date.

On February 26, the robot finally shipped off, and it was time to wait for the competition date.

The competition began on April 1. the team had about twelve hours to make its robot ready for the competition, as well as get in some practice (which it had not yet had any chance to do).

The next two days were the competition. There were forty-six robots competiting in the event, and after the first six qualifying rounds, Mitty's team was ranked 11th and had made it into the elimination rounds.

In the elimination rounds, the team got to choose its own alliance, and joined with an Alaskan team as well as the team from Milpitas High School. With these partners Mitty made it to the Semi-Finals before being beaten by Woodside and Carlemont High Schools and their teammates.

The team, thus, won the award for the best-seeded rookie team, as well as The General Motors Industrial Engineering award. Eventually, Mitty ended up between third and ninth place, depending on how you choose to score it, but in either case, it is extremely impressive for a first year team. Hopefully, Mitty will continue with such success in robotics in years to come.