Three Wildcats attended the worldwide FRC FIRST Robotics Competition with other Viera High students located in Orlando and the semifinals in Tallahassee recently. 

Since fall, freshman Dasha Budko, junior Pranav Ponnusamy and senior Ritvik Varada have been spending their afternoons helping their 30-to-40-person team prepare for the upcoming competition.

“Six weeks before the game gets announced, we have meetings Monday, Wednesday and Friday that last from 4:30 until 8:30, then on Saturdays, from 1:00 to 5:00,” Budko said.

After the long hours spent developing a functioning robot that could complete the task assigned to them at the competition, only 12 students were allowed to go to the three-day competition, starting March 23.

“This year, the task was picking up and placing cones and cubes onto these poles and these boxes,” Varada said. 

The competition was the best that the team had ever done, despite the challenges they had to overcome because of the pandemic.

“We went to Orlando and we were semi-finalists there, then we went to Tallahassee and we were eliminated,” Varada said. 

Budko said she doesn’t see the competition as the most important part of her experience.

“There’s a lot of people on the team who just lift each other up and it just builds a sense of community,” she said. 

By Zainab Hussain