Congratulations to Team SWARM, the high school robotics team from South Albany and West Albany high schools. During its first international Lego Robotics competition, the team won second place in a division finals competition.
The team earned the right to compete at the World Championship events by earning high scores at competitions at the regional and state levels earlier in the year.
Read the story in the Democrat-Herald.
SWARM team leader Robin Hobbensiefken shared the team experience in an email to supporters:
From Wednesday through Saturday last week, SWARM competed in Houston Texas in the FRC World Championships. 404 FRC teams traveled to Worlds and were split into 6 divisions. We were placed in arguably the most difficult division, Hopper.
We had some amazing games and performed very well. In the end we ranked 17th out of the 68 teams in our division. During alliance selection, we were picked to be on the number 3 alliance comprised of BumbleB from Israel, the Ratchet Rockers from Missouri and Walton Robotics from Georgia. Our alliance won the quarter final matches 2 – 1 and won 2-0 in the semi finals.
In the finals for Hopper field, our alliance played against the number 1 alliance of the Cheesy Poofs, Robowranglers, Spartabots and Ha-Dream Team. The Cheesy Poofs went undefeated all season this year. They have an absolutely amazing robot. They were able to beat our alliance 2 – 0 in the finals. After winning our division, the moved on and proceeded to win every match in the round robin play for Einstein finals qualification matches and went on to win the World Championships 2 – 0 in the finals.
We assembled a playlist with all of our matches from the World Championships.
From all of the students and mentors from SWARM, we want to thank you once more for helping out our team! We had an amazing season and a lot of fun. We really appreciate all that you have done for us!
Robin Hobbensiefken, Team 957 SWARM Lead Mentor