South Brunswick High School Robotics Team Clinches Spot in State Finals

Students from high schools across the state picked up their controllers and battled their robots in a series of tasks meant to test the design and function of their homemade robots in the qualifying rounds for the FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) held on Saturday Jan. 7 at the Liberty Science Center.

At the sound of the buzzer, each robot took off from its starting position and performed a series of tasks involved in the “Bowled Over” game. The top seven teams moved on to compete in the State Competition at the New Jersey Institute of Technology(NJIT) in February.

The SyBorgs, a rookie robotics team comprised of four freshman students from were part of the 16 competing teams. Not only, did they secure their position for the state finals, they were also the first winning alliance team, beating the number one and two ranked teams.

The SyBorgs very proudly accepted the First Place Alliance trophy. Apart, from this they also won the Motivate Award, which was a judged award.

The judges had this to say about the team, “This team electrified the judges with their high energy and cheering. There was nothing artificial about them, except their name. The team with the green hair gets the green light for the Motivate award!”

Over the past 14 weeks, the SyBorgs have worked diligently, creating a robot that is capable of collecting balls, placing them into crates and maneuvering a six pound bowling ball across the 12 x 12 playing field. Although they started working on this project independently, the group recently became affiliated with South Brunswick High School’s Technology Student Association club.