On Feb. 13, the Raven Robotics team met at FHC to work on their robot for the upcoming competition in March. Raven Robotics consists of high school students from FHSD schools. The team meets every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday during build season, which began on Jan. 9. Build season is when the team meets to work on the robot while off-season is during first semester and is used primarily to raise money. By the time the competition comes, the team will have put in about 66 hours worth of work into the robot.

“The low bar is the one field piece that does not change,” Braxton Nolan, a robotics member from FHC, said. “This year they changed it up a little, we’ll have one permanent obstacle, the low bar, then one of the obstacles the audience actually gets to choose, so it really does get the audience a bit involved.”

The upcoming competition will be March 9-12. The competition this year will be medieval-themed, featuring a castle and moat. The robots will have to perform tasks such as going over various types of terrain, going under a low bar, and new to this year, an obstacle chosen by the audience. With all the work put into the robot and the team’s previous competition records, the members are confident they will do well in the competition.

“We’ve done pretty good previously and this robot is going pretty well,” Alex Warhover, a robotics member from FHN, said. “We’re building it to be able to do several things so if one function starts to not work, because of Murphy’s law ‘anything that can go wrong, will go wrong’, we’ll still have a variety of good things we can do in place of it.”

The team is split up into smaller teams which work to help create the robot as efficiently as possible. The teams include programming, building and a new area: business. The business team helps with tasks needed for the team not directly related to building, such as marketing and awards.

“I mostly work with the programming team, however later in the year, I started working with what is now called our business team,” Connor McGuire, a robotics member from FHHS, said. “I help write some of the awards for the team.”

The team is currently looking for new members to help with business, but anyone is welcome to join robotics in any department, even if they have no former knowledge related to robotics.

“You can join and you may not know anything to do with tools. You may not even know how to use a hammer and we’ll teach you how to use a hammer. As long as you’re willing to work and learn we’ll take you,” Nolan said.