The last weekend of March featured the  Ventura Regional Competition where the FIRST Robotics Team 696, the Circuit Breakers, competed against 41 other teams from all of Southern California, including some of the best teams in the country.

“We applied, signed up, and they let us compete,” senior Olivia Brandt said. “We knew were going to do this competition, so we practiced and prepared accordingly.” Brandt is Team 696’s head of Computer Aided Manufacturing, or CAM for short. She creates tool paths and the simulations of the parts that eventually go into the machine. “What I design later goes to either the 3D printer of the computer numerical control machines,” Brandt said.

Team 696 competed in several games, one of them called “Recycled Rush,” in which teams had to direct their robots to stack bins on top of bins with noodles on them. The end goal was to stack as many bins as possible without tipping over the boxes with noodles. “We were able to stack five bins and still get the noodles to stay put,” Brandt said.

The successes of Team 696 included scoring third highest in autonomous mode and getting ranked 5th out of 44 teams over 12 qualification rounds. The successes can be credited to “a lot of practice driving; practice makes perfect,” Brandt said.

The team had little time to celebrate once they won a round, as most teammates had to look very critically at what they were doing. “We constantly were asking, ‘What do we need to improve? What did we do well and what can we fix?’” she said.

The team is done competing for this year; however, they made it to semifinals in the regional competition and hope to continue to improve and work on their skills and machines for future years. Brandt proclaimed, “We were very close!”