Robot Challenge: Students programming their futures

In the past two months, Carson High School senior Sean Lopez, 18, estimates he went home right after school maybe five times.

He and his nine Brobot teammates immersed themselves in preparing for Saturday's robotics competition, Northern Nevada FIRST Tech Challenge Championship.

From learning the rules of the competition to building and programming their robot, it was all new.

"We didn't know anything," said Andrea Muzio, 18, a foreign-exchange student from Italy. "We started from zero."

But the competition - hosted at Carson High School between 17 teams from Nevada, Utah and California - got off to a good start.

"This is fantastic," Lopez said. "We're doing so much better than we would ever have expected."

During the competition, Bowled Over, teams faced off against one another on a 12-by-12-foot, diamond-shaped field. Each team's robot was tasked with a series of assignments from moving balls to stacking crates. Each task was assigned a point value.

The top two teams will go on to compete at the World Festival, also known as the Super Bowl of Smarts, in St. Louis.

Silver State Charter School's RoboMagic team, dressed in pink tu-tus, wasn't too concerned about points, though.

"We're not really as competitive as the rest of the teams," said Michael Williams, 17. "We're just having fun."

Held up as one of the teams to beat was Folsom, Calif.'s PHOENXTRIX team. But things weren't working out for them as planned.

"Right now, our robot is malfunctioning," said Vamsee Gangaram, 13.

Jaser Eusuff, 14, said they were working to debug it.

"We have to isolate the separate factors that could go wrong," he said.

Still, they weren't letting it defeat them.

"We're stressed out, but we have faith it will work," said Gangaram.

Organized through Space Science for Schools, the event was sponsored by Carson City's CGI, a company that makes robotic components.

Owners Mike Madison and Brian Coclich opened up their shop for tours and presented all participants with a tool kit.

"This really fits the type of work we're involved with," said Madison, president of the company. "We really want to encourage young people to explore technology and engineering as a potential career path."

That's what Zach Burgess, 16, a junior at Yerington High School, hopes to do.

"I really want to be an engineer," he said. "I've always liked to build things. This just motivated me even more."