Deep within Scarborough High School, past classrooms, offices, locker rooms and the gym, there’s a door labeled “Robotics.”

Inside is where the Robotics Club has been hard at work for the past three years, and that hard work has paid off. One of its two teams has qualified for the VEX Robotics World Championship in Texas in May.

Freshman Ethan Rasquinha, juniors Mobean Mohabbati and Sriram Munanngi, and senior Krishna Mattaparthi, make up the “Meme Team” that will go up against 809 other teams, including two from Cape Elizabeth and five others from Maine, at the Dallas competition.

They’re building their bot now with the goal of finishing it before the April school break. The bot will compete in the point-based game “Tipping Point,” where it will have to pick up and move objects of various sizes while quickly maneuvering a 12-foot-by-12 foot field. The team will also compete in individual skill competitions, such as maneuvering their bot manually and an “autonomous” contest, in which the bot functions on its own to test the team’s coding abilities.

Qualifying for the championship was not an easy task, the team said, and there were a lot of lessons learned throughout the season, starting with the team’s first competition in October.

“We completed our first bot two days before the meet,” Munnangi said. “It was hard at times, but we came through.”

While the team would have liked to place higher at that first event, they were competitive, Mattaparthi said, and immediately began working for their second meet.

“We just started building and came up with a really nice bot,” he said.

The team placed third in their second meet, and it was there, Mattaparthi said, that they learned how to better play to members’ strengths.

“That’s where we found Mobean can drive better than me,” he said, allowing him to focus on his own strength: coding.

Mohabbati joined the club this year and quickly became accustomed to the on-the-fly mentality needed to compete in the VEX Robotics world.

“As much as you plan, you can’t figure out precisely what you need until you go into the meet,” he said. “Worst case, we go into it, we do very bad, but we learn from it.”

Ethan Rasquinha, a member of the Robotics Club’s other team who is helping the Meme Team with its bot, said his team once had to rebuild a bot in the middle of a meet.

“We completely redesigned our bot during the meet because we found out it didn’t work,” he said. “We tore it down halfway, pretty much, and then we rebuilt it.”

VEX Robotics isn’t what someone would likely picture when they hear of a robotics competition.

“It’s not like ‘Battle Bots,’ like what you see on TV,” Mohabbati said. “It’s a point-based game.”

Tipping Point is a complex and strategic two-on-two game. Teams are paired up randomly for the first match of the competition, and from there they are allowed to choose their partners for the remainder of the meet.

Robots have two minutes to collect rings and put them in mobile goals, with points awarded according to the difficulty level of each goal. The bots also are able to move the goals to score points and sabotage their competitors. The bots can score big points at the end of each match by balancing with their goals on a seesaw.

The Scarborough team did not qualify for the World Championship via the Tipping Point competition, but through the “Robot Skills” portion of the meet, which includes driving the bot and the “autonomous” contest that tests coding.

“That’s what these guys are really good at,” said Kerry Kertes, a STEM and Engineering teacher at Scarborough High School, who oversees the club. “Some of the best in the state.”

Scarborough resident Josh Chalmers, an IT software applications manager at Texas Instruments, helped jump-start the Scarborough program during the 2019-2020 school year and works with the club weekly.

“It’s pretty exciting, teams come from around the globe,” Chalmers said of the World Championship. “They decorate their work area with flags and food and stuff to handout to other teams. It’s kind of an exciting melting pot of teams and students getting to know each other.”

Mattaparthi is one of two graduating seniors in the club, and is passing the torch to younger students, like freshman Samier Tardy.

“He’s my cousin,” Tardy said, gesturing to Mohabbati. “He started talking about it a lot and I found interest in it.”

Mattaparthi believes, no matter what the team’s result is in Dallas, he’s leaving the club in good hands.

“When I graduate, I’m hoping they’ll be the number one team,” he said, before correcting himself. “No, I’m sure they’ll be the number one team.”

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