Robotics Team's Time, Hard Work Pay Off
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Juniors and seniors from the Harborfields Robotics Club celebrate their victory at the Long Island Championship Finals at Smithtown East last weekend. Photo courtesy of Michael Pinto
By Connor Beach
cbeach@longislandergroup.com
The seniors on the Harborfields High School Robotics team have been working for nearly four years to build up the school’s robotics program, and this year it appears their hard work is paying off.
After finishing on the winning alliance at the Long Island Championship Finals, which were held Feb. 11 at Smithtown East High School, the Harborfields team is now gearing up for the FIRST Robotics Eastern Regional Finals.
Senior and Robotics Club President Ben Messing said this year has been by far the most successful since the club was started in his freshman year.
“This is the first time that we reached the Long Island championships, and we even made it to the regional finals,” Messing said.
Messing attributed the year’s success to experience and the great student leadership from the club’s seniors.
“For the past three years we’ve been sort of figuring it out as we go, and this year we started with a set plan,” Messing said.
This year Messing said the club decided to divide into three teams, each with about 15 students.
Harborfields science teacher and club advisor Michael Pinto said the creation of freshman, sophomore and junior-senior teams created friendly competition the helped the team of upperclassmen reach the Eastern Regional Finals.
“Having to teach the younger guys what to do made them really focus and learn it well themselves,” Pinto said. “Having the friendly competition between the three teams at Harborfields helped the juniors and seniors really step it up this year.”
The club’s lead programmer senior Jack Taliercio said the team has been building their robot since September when the FIRST Tech Challenge was released. This year the challenge, called relic recovering, requires teams to build a robot that can stack up foam cubes and extend an arm over a wall to place objects.
“This year, from a technical standpoint, we took more risks,” Taliercio said. “This year we were ambitious, we built the robot in a unique way that was different from most teams.”
Looking ahead to the regional finals, Pinto said he is proud of the student’s hard work and is confident that their design is good enough to challenge for one of the top spots at the competition.
Messing said the seniors especially are really looking forward to their first regional finals.
He said, “This is an awesome way to end four years of running this club, and I’m very excited to see what other areas of the country are doing in robotics.”
Harborfields is scheduled to compete against 18 other teams from Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, Wisconsin and Ohio in the FIRST Robotics Eastern Regional Finals on March 16-18 at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania.
