As sophomore Julia Salita looks forward to the upcoming Minnesota 10,000 Lakes Regional Robotics Competition she said she felt optimistic about the Robotics team’s opportunities to advance.

“I’m really excited because I went last year and it was a lot of fun, even though we didn’t win or go onto the semifinals. But I’m also a little nervous because last year was my first year and I didn’t really know what was going on, but this year I do,” Salita said.

According to Salita, the upcoming competition has a space theme, which the robots must be designed around.

“The goal this year is called Destination Deep Space, and so there are these catch panels that are kind of big disks that we have that we have to stick onto a cargo ship or a rocket,” Salita said. “And then you have to load the cargo, which are balls into the cargo ships, and at the end of the match you get points.”

According to senior Alessandro Giannetti, who is a Robotics Captain, Robotics has been faced with attendance issues.

“We haven’t had as many people showing up as we realistically should have. There has only been three to four people consistently coming. We do say show up when you can, but some people seem to think it’s show up when you want,” Gianetti said.

According to Robotics adviser Trevor Paulson, Robotics was forced to change strategies due to snow days, which overlapped with the build season.

“They have had some really grand ideas and items that they wanted to get engineered and built, but we are running out of time to get those completed,” Paulson said. “There’s a lot of Minnesota teams in a similar situation where they have lost days because of snow days, so they are going to have to structure things a little bit differently too.”

Giannetti said Robotics hopes to use the offseason to their advantage in order to make up for lost time.As sophomore Julia Salita looks forward to the upcoming Minnesota 10,000 Lakes Regional Robotics Competition she said she felt optimistic about the Robotics team’s opportunities to advance.

“If we could only use the build season we probably wouldn’t do as well as we had hoped, but with the time we have in the offseason we should still do pretty well,” Giannetti said.

According to Paulson, the robotics competition teaches a variety of important skills which will benefit students throughout their academic careers.

“It’s a matter of trying to build a team community and then learn a number of different skills such as programming, engineering, build and design, in order to accomplish a task together. And then work cooperatively with a number of other teammates to complete the various tasks,” Paulson said.

According to Gianetti, Robotics continues to focus on its ambitious goal to make it to the finals.

“For each game that we play there’s two alliances of three teams, so we are playing with two other schools against three others. For the finals, the top 10 teams pick two other teams to be their alliance through the finals. The farthest we’ve gone previously is semifinals in 2017,” Gianetti said.

According to The Blue Alliance, the Robotics competition will take place March 29 and 30 at the Williams Arena and Sports Pavilion.