MILL CREEK—Jack-in-the-Bot, Henry M Jackson High School’s robotics team, made Washington proud last month by becoming the first Mill Creek team ever to secure a World Championship title with their robot ‘Spectre.’ Henry M Jackson High School, located at 1508 136th St SE, Mill Creek, is part of the Everett Public Schools.
The FIRST Robotics Global Competition was held in Houston, Texas, from April 16 to April 19 and pitted teams against each other to design, construct, and program a robot from the ground up to carry out a specific task. This year’s challenge was themed on ocean cleanup where robots had to pick up “coral” and hook it onto “reef” branches, as well as pick up “algae” pieces and score it into a net.
The event ran for three days, all day from 7 a.m. until 8 p.m., and packed the George R. Brown Convention Center with approximately 50,000 attendees.
Jack-in-the-Bot, also known as Team 2910, got first place out of 3,700 teams from all over the world.
Though this is the first time a Mill Creek high school has ever received a World Championship title, Team 2910 got close in 2018 when they made it to the World Finalists and in 2022, they got third place.
According to Andrea Riseden-Perry, Team 2910 Mentor, the win has been seven years in-the-making, utilizing everything the team has learned from participating in global tournaments in the past. Along with that, when participating in competitions such as these, a lot can go wrong that is out of the team’s control, she added, from mechanical failures to the robot falling apart. Luckily, however, everything went smoothly this year leading into the win.
Riseden-Perry got involved in the Henry M. Jackson High School’s robotics program the same year it went to World Finalists in 2018, back when her oldest was still a freshman.
“I went to a couple events, and I fell completely in love with what I saw – the energy, the nature of the program, the collaboration. I mean it’s highly, highly, competitive but we also have this attitude that we all get better when we all perform our best, so we all help one another out,” said Riseden-Perry. “I love the kids, and I love the positive energy.”
Riseden-Perry, a graphic designer by trade, has been involved with the program, in one way or another, ever since. She takes a relatively hands-off approach when mentoring the kids, allowing them to have complete control of their work.
While the whole point of a robotics program is to get kids interested in STEM fields – engineering, mathematics, and so on – Riseden-Perry compares it to running a startup where your entire staff turns over every four years and creating/marketing a product.
A good portion of the team’s finances, including what’s used to transport the team and its robot to the World Championship in Houston, come from fundraising where these marketing skills are put to the test.
Part of the ethos Jack-in-the-Bot developed is to make its robots relatively compact for easy transport. All their robots, dating back to 2022, have been able to be disassembled so that they can be put on an airplane as luggage.
Jack-in-the-Bot’s robot that took them to World Finalists in 2018 was named “Phantom” and had an innovative arm so innovative that seven other teams in FIRST Robotics recreated it as a teaching mechanism in the off-season.
This year’s robot “Spectre,” which secured the World Champ title, is very similar to Phantom in a lot of ways but with several improvements to optimize its performance in this year’s game requirements which required several different engineering puzzles to figure out.
The FIRST students are only given eight weeks to design, program, and construct a robot.
Riseden-Perry explained that there is a period of time between the “raw” score and the “final” score being announced, while judges count pieces and evaluate performances.
“From the raw score we looked like we hadn’t [won], but nobody wanted to jynx it,” said Riseden-Perry. “But when they revealed the final score, and it was a battle – this was not easy, I was literally jumping up and down in the stands.”
The team had to be up at 3 a.m. to catch their flight back to Washington the next day, so had a mildly tame celebration with pizza and cake at the hotel.
Since returning to Snohomish County, however, the team has been invited to be honored at various School Boards and City Councils, continuing ongoing celebrations.
“The thing that’s so incredible about this program that isn’t exactly true for most athletics is this is a program where every kid can go pro,” said Riseden-Perry. “If you love engineering, you love mathematics, you love technical anything, you can absolutely go to college with this.”
Several colleges offer FIRST Robotics members scholarship opportunities but that’s just one way it gives kids a “leg-up” in the real world, Riseden-Perry added. When a FIRST Robotics student took their first CAD class, for example, their instructor allotted three hours to do it but the student was done in 30 minutes.
Jack-in-the-Bot competes through an organization called FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and technology) Robotics, a not-for-profit organization that prepares young people for the future through its youth robotics programs.
Jack-in-the-Bot competes within the Pacific Northwest region which has about 140 teams across Washington State. Through the month of March all the teams throughout Washington and Oregon compete in events, and qualifying events, culminating in a regional Championship.
Based on performances here, the top 20 teams in the Pacific Northwest are selected to compete in the World Championships which features robotics teams from around the world – from Mexico, to Brazil, to Israel, to Australia, and beyond – It was during this regional competition when Jack-in-the-Bot was a finalist, landing a gold ticket to the global competition in Houston this year.
Other local teams that competed at the FIRST Robotics competition included Royal Robotics 2522 (Lynnwood High School), Chill Out 1178 (Mountlake Terrace High School), Sonic Squirrels 2930 (Glacier Peak and Snohomish high schools), and Arrowdynamics 10079 (Bothell High School).
Author: Kienan Briscoe
