More than 30 high school students on five teams are participating this season.  With all the success the Newberg High School robotics program has enjoyed in recent years, including back-to-back trips to the FTC World Championships in 2012 and 2013, it was bound to experience a significant growth spurt at some point.

That’s exactly what happened this year, as the club drew over 30 students and fielded five teams, up from three a year ago.

“I guess we were ready to expand,” NHS teacher and club advisor Terry Coss said. “I had never advertised for kids to show up because we don’t have the kind of funds it takes to supply three dozen kids with robotic parts. Finally it just happened. We had funds to do five robots thanks to donations from the people of Newberg.”

Word of mouth appears to have been the biggest reason for the expansion.

For example, sophomore Riley Woodland raved about her experience last year with her Iron Men team so much during its run to the West Super Regional tournament that four girls cited her as the reason they joined the all-female team. (The moniker comes from the pun-creating combination of the elemental symbol for Iron and Male, or Fe Male).

“The transition worked out pretty well,” senior returner Jessica Stone said. “We lost half the team, but we gained about the same number of people. There are no real egos on the team. There’s no one trying to control everything. We’re all working pretty well together.”

Sophomore Brandon Takahashi, who is a member of the almost-completely-rookie team Bullet Proof, had a much more practical reason for signing up, but is enjoying it just as much as any other newcomer nonetheless. He took computer programming as a freshman, but when that wasn’t offered this year he had to go another route.

“I wanted to dive deeper into programming and this was one of the only extracurricular activities that actually offers programming,” Takahashi said. “It’s very challenging. I’m learning something pretty much every day. This is the first time I’ve used this type of coding, so it’s all new.”

Team Bullet Proof was one of two NHS teams to advance to this weekend’s super qualifier after four competed at the qualifying tournament Feb. 7 at Lake Oswego High School.

Team member Eli Gonzalez, a senior rookie, said building a competition-ready robot was very challenging for a team that featured just one veteran, who himself had only one year of experience, but ultimately enjoyable.

“We’re working on consistency,” Gonzalez said. “The challenge was a lot more taxing than you’d expect. You pick up balls and put them in tubes, that’s easy, right? Not when you’ve got a robot that’s got to fit in an 18 x 18 x 18 cube.”

Bullet Proof ranked 18th out of about 24 teams in the robot competition, but earned a bid to the super qualifier on the merit of a strong outreach project ­­­­— working with the middle school programs — and impressing judges with their design presentation.

Team Revolution, which also features six rookies and a single one-year veteran, advanced from the qualifying tournament after being the first pick of the winning alliance at Lake Oswego.

“We hit our stride late,” said George Fox student Ryan Elder, who is mentoring the team. “We had some struggles. We had to get some kinks out of the system, but we rebounded nicely toward the second half of the competition.”

Sophomore Garrison of Team Revolution found himself drawn to the program for similar reasons as his counterpart on Bullet Proof, Takahashi.

“I’ve been programming on my own for several years and this is a pretty cool way for me to physically do programming,” Peacock said. “It’s just fun building robots.”

Team Revolution is pretty confident heading into the super qualifier because after finding its stride late, it was able to fine tune its machine last week and expected to spend most of its time this week practicing the robot game

That’s not the case for two of Newberg’s veteran teams, the Iron Men and Team Aeterna, who did not advance from Lake Oswego.

Both teams said they have found the robot game to be more difficult this year, in part because a team can no longer rely on playing defense and therefore must be able to score efficiently.

This year’s challenge, entitled “Cascade Effect,” essentially tasks the robots with collecting balls and depositing them into cylinders of various height. Not only has it proved more difficult for the robots to grasp the balls, but there are more scoring tubes on the scoring field, many of which can be moved by the robots.

“That also makes it a little more dynamic,” Aeterna member Sage Albright said. “It also means you kind of need to be able to score to win match.”

Aeterna found its original strategy for transferring balls, shooting them up into the air to drop in the cylinders, was too erratic and is doing a major redesign.

After staunchly sticking with their design last year, the Iron Men are also doing a fairly major redesign.

Both teams will need some help from Bullet Proof and Revolution in order to qualify for the state tournament March 7-8 at Benson High School in Portland.

As a host of the super qualifier at Evergreen Air and Space Museum this weekend, Newberg will receive two bids to state.

If Bullet Proof and Revolution both advance to state when they compete Saturday, the Iron Men and Aeterna will get those bids. If one or neither qualify, the remaining teams will have an intra-squad competition to determine who will represent Newberg.

Even if the two veteran squads advance, they will not be able to test their new designs in a true competition setting against a variety of teams from other schools. Yet both remain confident.

“We’re working on a design that should eliminate the problems that we had,” Stone said. “If we can get it together, I think we’ll have a pretty good shot.”

Newberg’s fifth group, the mostly veteran Team Underscore, opted to take a new and different path to the state meet and have already been eliminated.

This year, the Oregon Robotics Tournament and Outreach Program (ORTOP), which runs the state tournament and has seen the number of teams across the state continue to grow, created a second league system of qualification.

Teams that chose the league route would have three regional tournaments over the course of about six weeks to compete against the same teams, with the top performers for the entire period advancing. The catch is that those tournaments began in November and finished in late December or early January, meaning teams would have less time to prepare their robots.

“It was more like a sport where you go out and play every weekend rather than them all being chunked into one day,” Coss said. “That was a tough one to get ready for.”

Both Team Revolution and Team Bullet Proof will participate Saturday, with competition beginning around noon, then volunteer with the rest of the Newberg program to help run the Sunday competition.

While having five teams has meant space in the NHS machine shop has been tight, which has been just a minor setback according to Albright, the growth of the program will be handy over the weekend.

“It’s really starting to boom,” Aeterna member Morgan Shine said. “Everybody wants in.”

Written by: Seth Gordon