The Orange High School Robotics Team won the NC State Championship for Robotics! Everyone on that team is doing a phenomenal job representing OHS. Now that the team won the state competition they get to go to Houston Texas to compete on the national level. They won states by creating a robot that could pick up/suck up balls and then shoot them into a hoop with somewhat amazing accuracy. They have worked extremely hard for this and everyone is super excited to get to go to Houston!

But there is a challenge. There are around 35 people on the team and the goal was to get everybody to go. So in order to do that, they have had to raise money and they set up a gofundme page and they are seeking help to go. The link also shows a video of the team’s robot in action. The competition is on April 20th. So they are responsible for paying for travel, food, and hotels, which is not an easy task for 35 students, not including the teachers that may want to go to. Also in the finals, there are over 450 teams competing, which means that there is a ton of people/high schoolers that are going to be there.

Overall it is an amazing thing for the hard work of these students to pay off and we are all very happy for them.” We learn to work together and fix everything as quickly and as effectively as possible,” said Sophia Cauwels, a senior on the team. The team was also working to hopefully construct a video to send to the people that do donate.”Now we’re just seeing everything fall into place – it’s the best feeling I’ve ever had, especially having worked on this for so long,” said sophomore Anthony Riuz. Also, you have to remember that when most of the freshmen come on to the robotics team they come with no or little experience.

This team is the second oldest in the entire state, so a lot of history also goes into it. They have had a lot of challenges over the past year with COVID and weather-related issues. Which means that they had to work extra hard to be able to get the robot together and working. They had several different challenges this year while building their robot, one of them being the game’s climbing challenge which was totally different from any of the previous years per Mrs. Sandy Hankins, one of the team leaders. “As a team we came up with an extremely elegant solution with our cable car esce climber which is extremely reliable and stable, always maintaining two points of contact on the monkey bars which are used as the competition platform.” – Mrs. Sandy Hankins. We wish them luck and hope for the best in their journey to Houston.