Most students were still asleep at 6:45 a.m. on Saturday, Nov. 15 when five students interested in robotics met outside engineering teacher Miquel Picart’s classroom to board a suburban and drive to Ft.Worth.

For these students – freshmen Timothy Yabuki, Declan Quinn and Hudson Fitzgerald, and juniors Amy Ramirez and Ben Muir – the next 12 hours were filled with the whirring of motors and tense chatter at the Vex Robotics Competition.

Upon entering the back room where the teams registered their robots and waited to be called, one’s ears were assaulted with loud yet serious conversations. Occasionally, the rancorous screech of a Dremel hand saw would pierce the noise and silence the hall, the teams pausing before their elegant entities of engineering.

Despite the serious undertones, the teams were nice and talkative, even allowing closer inspection of their precious bots. And precious bots they were. Scissor bots, vertical lifts, hallodromic drives – all different kinds of fine machines, each designed to execute one problem in two ways: either by stacking pillars or by stacking cubes.

Working together, each team tried to raise their score in order to be looked favorably upon at the end of qualifiers. The Arlington High team and their bot, Amy 2.0, managed a final ranking of 17 out of 23, under the control of driver Muir, co-driver Quinn, and coach Ramirez.

The Arlington High team made it to eliminations and into the alliance round. In the alliance round, each team sends one representative to work out an “alliance” with another team. If an alliance is formed, those teams work together instead of being in randomised matches. The Arlington High team was one of the last chosen for an alliance, finally pairing up with the Gigabots, another local team.

The two teams’ bots complemented each other nicely, and together they won the quarterfinals, then the semifinals, and eventually even the finals themselves. The total competition lasted 12 hours, with matches happening around every 10 minutes. The outcome, however, was well worth the wait.