This robot was the star of the show two weeks ago, when eight students from Lake Placid Middle/High School participated in the annual FIRST Robotics Competition in Albany. The Lake Placid RobOlympians team ended up placing 28th out of 56 times. They had nine wins and three losses in the competition and were in 14th place at one point in the competition. The Northwood School team finished in 17th place.

Olaf Carlson is a Spanish teacher at the middle/high school and also helps run the robotics team alongside first-year technology teacher Greg Lindsay. Lindsay said he is proud of the students for holding their own against schools with more time and resources than Lake Placid. For some of these schools, robotics is pursued like a full-time sport. In contrast, the Lake Placid team has a 40-minute class period and many of them are juggling jobs and multiple school sports.

On top of that, robotics is an expensive activity. They are required to have industrial-strength materials. The Lake Placid robotics team operates with a budget of around $12,000 for their competition season.

Lindsay said some teams have budgets ten or fifteen times that.

One of the teams with a bigger budget, Northwood School, has become a partner to the Lake Placid RobOlympians. The Northwood team lends them equipment and materials, and even use of their facility.

“They were very gracious to us,” Carlson said.

To help cover the cost of the competition, the team applied for and was granted $2,500 in cannabis taxation funds from the town of North Elba. They are also sponsored by Northwoods School, Norsk Titanium, the American Legion Post 326, the Lake Placid Central School and Long Run Wealth Advisors.

The team finds out at the beginning of January what the “game” will be for the year’s competition. This includes the different kinds of tasks the robot can be designed and programmed to do, each associated with different point values. That means they only have a few months to build, strategize and troubleshoot.

The competition itself is a fast-paced extension of this, a marathon of building, competing and problem solving. When something breaks (and the robots move so fast, breaking is inevitable), the students need to figure out how to fix it. If their program isn’t running quite right, they adjust the code to try and solve it.

The competition runs for about 10 hours each day, all spent crammed into an arena packed with thousands of fans and other teams. They barely see the light of day, Carlson joked.

“The Albany air smells fresh afterwards,” said Michael Kern, one of the students on the team.

The “pits” — where the teams work on their robots in between rounds of competition — are chaotic and fast-paced. Some of the teams take it very seriously.

“There are pit stops that are formula I level,” Lindsay said.

These competitions also emphasize “gracious professionalism,” with the idea that every team helps each other out and creates a positive, collaborative environment even amidst intense competition.

“Even though they might be competitors, try to bring their level of play up so the overall level of play is higher,” Carlson said.

For example, a team might get on the PA system saying they need a hinge. Four minutes later, Lindsay said, there might be three teams offering a piece of equipment.

“I went to engineering school for eight years and played competitive sports,” Lindsay said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen something like this.”

Now the team is taking what they learned from the competition, the things that worked and the things that didn’t, and they’re honing their design. In the fall, some of the students will get the chance to take this same robot to a second competition to try the same game again. They’ll spend the rest of this year troubleshooting and creating prototypes for added features or functions.

In the meantime, they’ll enjoy the camaraderie they’ve developed within their own team, and with other teams.

“In my four years in the robotics program, the best thing in the robotics program has always been the people I built the robot with and who I share this experience with,” said senior Robert Bowen.