The Annandale robotics team placed sixth at the Bot Ball engineering competition on April 1.

Bot Ball is an educational robotic program that engages teamwork and leadership experience by building robots to compete against each other. The big difference from other robot competitions is that the robots need to be autonomous and students need to use science, engineering, technology, math and writing skills on their inventions.

This competition is held regionally in the United States but also is held in other countries such as Qatar, China, Europe and Africa forming in total 305 global teams.

Thanks to the support of Philip Harris, six students represented the school as a team in this interesting competition by presenting their robot.

“[The competition was an] 8 week program with various assignments due every 2 weeks. [Students] use legos, motors, and servos to create autonomous robots” said Harris.

AHS has been participating in the competition since 2000.

As part of this competition, participants had the option of attending a workshop where they can work on their projects and also they will take a class with distinguished professors.

“There were professors from CalTech/Oklahoma/ Univ. of Maryland and other Professional Engineers that taught classes during those two days” Harris said.

The hard work and experience that the team had on this event led them to get first place on team alliance, second place on cohort , third place on double elimination and overall the team got sixth place with a score of 3.20 from 25 schools and teams in Virginia, Maryland and DC. In addition they got an award for the most improved team on the competition.