By David Kelly
Staff Writer

Pembroke Academy’s Team Discovery makes some repairs to their robot. The students were assisted by NHTI professors Lynn Darnell and Lenny Harrrison. They made it as far as the quarterfinals of the FIRST competition.

The FIRST robotics team from Pembroke Academy had a great run at the BAE Systems Granite State Regional at the Verizon Wireless Arena March 3 and 4.

Pembroke Academy and Trinity High School were among the teams competing in the last part of the competition, while the West High School PowerKnights, Central High School’s Team CHAOS and Memorial High School’s Cruisin’ Crusaders gave it their best shot and had to settle for cheering on other teams.

This year’s FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) game “Aim High” involves shooting 7-inch toy basketballs through a 8-1/2 feet high goal or two floor-level goals, then climbing a ramp before the end of a two-minute match.

Pembroke’s robot ran strong throughout the qualification rounds, but its accurate shooting ability kept it double- and triple-teamed throughout the matches. Nonetheless, Team Discovery managed to win four out of its nine matches and drew the attention of the fourthranked team, who selected them for the elimination rounds.

The alliance of Team 1474 – Tewksbury Memorial High School of Tewksbury, Mass.; Team 1138 – Chaminade College Preparatory of West Hills, Calif.; and Team 134 – Pembroke Academy were outgunned in the quarterfinals by the alliance which went on become the champions of the regional, consisting of Team 133 – Bonny Eagle High School of Standish, Maine; Midcoast School of Technology of Rockland, Maine; and Milford Area Youth Homeschoolers of Milford.

A great performance was given by driving team members Ryan Foster, Brian Roche and Josh Lemoine and human players Colby Sortevik and Alex Ham. Battery maintenance, by Jeff Levesque, kept the robot in power throughout the weekend.

Team 134 was narrowly edged out of the Chairman’s Award by a long-deserving but too often overlooked Team 190, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, despite a great interview given by Bryon Pond, Colby Sortevik and Brian Roche. Safety manager Scott Christie helped land in the team in the top four out of 51 teams, which provided the team with Safety Award pins. The team also brought home an EasyC programming award for helping with testing a new robotics programming language.

One of Pembroke’s proudest moments of the weekend was when both the rookie teams they mentored throughout the season, Team 1721, Concord High School and Team 1922, Hopkinton High School and John Stark Regional High School, both won the prestigious Rookie All-Star Award.

The team this year received great technical support from Robert Arredondo, Lynn Darnell, Steve Ryan and Lenny Harrison from the New Hampshire Technical Institute; David Bean of Metal Casting Technologies, Inc.; and Stan Podlaseck, retired engineer. Pembroke’s team was funded through a grant from BAE Systems and the support of many area businesses and organizations.

West did take home a trophy for the Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers Entrepreneurship Award. This award is given to a team that can show it runs the team like a business, complete with records to show how money is raised, distributed and used.

The PowerKnights will give the game another try, as the team will travel to Los Angeles in a few weeks to compete once more.

FIRST is an organization founded by inventor Dean Kamen and promotes science and technology through robotics and other activities. They provide 33 regional competitions throughout the world and an international championship which includes more than 1,000 robotics teams, involving over 100,000 students. They also are associated with more than $6.5 million in college scholarships. FIRST provides the VEX robotics competitions and the FIRST Lego League for other levels of robotic competition.

– David Kelly is a teacher at Pembroke Academy who has been helping the school’s FIRST team for many years. Ginger Kozlowski also contributed to this story.