With the ongoing success of Monte Vista’s student robotics club, the Red Ties have recently competed in the World Championships at Edwards Jones Dome (aka the Rams stadium) in St. Louis, Missouri.

Co-presidents Ducati Mondani and Christopher Gareau were among the twelve representatives that went to St. Louis.

Other representatives Sean Casement, Brendan Sweeney, Alexander Ferguson, Maria Borromeo, Michael Gareau, Chase Johnson, Joel Herman, Bjorn Nordgren, Eric Chien,  and Andrew Beirne also went to the world championship.

“We competed with about 600 other teams in front of tens of thousands of people,” said Maria Borromeo, Chief Marketing Officer of Red Tie Robotics, “It was an incredible experience. Those of us fortunate enough to attend were able to meet people from around the world.

This year’s challenge was to build a robot that can stack six ‘totes’ on top of each other, then proceed to stack recycling bins on top of those to receive more points.

During the qualifying rounds, each team is paired with two others to work together to complete the challenge. Choice of teams are completely random and co-president Ducati Mondani states that it’s vital that the teams live up to what they say.

“Because of this randomness we go around to every team and interview them to find out what they are capable of and then along with that we have students watching every match that keep track of each robot individually,” said Mondani, “We call this scouting and it is the most important job on our team.”

Seven scouts are required to do this job. One student goes to every pit, and six other observe the other teams’ individual robots.

Four other robotics students known as the drive team are then responsible for operating the robot itself. One driver operates the robot base, while another controls the functions of the robot.

“ [Our team] operates as a business with presidents, a strategy team, marketing team, financial team, a team of adult mentors that act as advisors for each sub-team, a scouting team, and a production team with sub teams for each part of the robot from design to manufacturing,” said Borromeo.

A coach supervises the two drivers, and the Human Player makes sure the pool noodles and Totes are on the field. The last person maintains safety.

The Red Ties participated in two regionals; UC Davis in Sacramento and the Ventura College Regional (in Ventura). In order to qualify for the World Championships, robotics team had to win a regional event. Unfortunately, Monte Vista Robotics lost regionals by twelve points.

Another way to qualify is the Chairman’s Award, the most prestigious award in FIRST. FIRST (For the Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) is a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) based group that sponsors an annual robotics competition for high school students.

“The slogan they have adopted is More Than Robots, meaning there is so much more to participating in a FIRST robotics team,” said Maria Borromeo, “This is absolutely true as students that participate learn important skills that will carry on to life, college, and professional careers.”

To win this award, Mondani explains that the robotics team has to do community service and spread STEM awareness with the FIRST robotics programs.

These programs  include Junior FIRST LEGO League (FLL), FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC), and FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC).

FLL is for elementary students as an introduction to robotics and engineering. They construct LEGO robots and program them for different tasks.

FTC is the next step from FLL, in which middle to high school age students build robots similar to those in FRC.

Red Tie Robotics qualified with the last possibility; random selection. However, they later discover that it wasn’t all that random after all.

“[They selects] teams that almost qualified, and because we were only 12 points away we were selected to go to world,” said Mondani.

At the Championships themselves, there are eight events going on simultaneously and eventually narrows down into one final, explained Mondani.

Each event was named after a famous inventor or scientist, the names being Archimedes, Carson, Carver, Curie, Hopper, Newton, Tesla, and Galileo.

The winners of the fields would then play each other for the world title. Monte Vista’s Red Ties were in Carson.

For example,  Carson would play Galileo, and the winner would go on to Newton or Hopper, and so on and so forth until the last two fields battle it out on Einstein, the main field.

“In our division we placed 68th out of 76 teams,” said Mondani, “however, out of all 608 teams, [those] that completed our ranking would be somewhere around 245 out of 608 teams.”

“I believe that this team has grown so much in the past year,” said Borromeo, “Our season was incredible. With all of the hard work and dedication from the team, the World Championship was the perfect end to the season.”