The following is from Allan Tumolillo
Photo from www.somsd.k12.nj.us
On February 12th, under the guidance Columbia High School physics teacher Allan Tumolillo, the CHS Robotics Team competed at the Northeast League Meets Championships at River Dell High School, and two of the school’s four teams qualified for the state championships.
This year, each team is aligned with a “class”: Team 4102 – seniors; Team 5332 – juniors; Team 7959 – sophomores; Team 9563 – freshmen and middle school. Teams 4102 and 7959 will move on to the state competition and Team 4102 also came home with the Parametric Design Corporation (PTC) Design Award for their robots’ aesthetics and efficiency.
In the world of high school competitive robotics, there are several divisions (some of which come with $100,000 budgets!). CHS competed in the US First Tech Challenge. In NJ alone there are about 150+ teams in the FTC division, organized into 4 “leagues” — Northeast, Northwest, Central and South. Columbia is in the Northeast League along with teams from Livingston, Millburn and Montclair.
There are two routes to qualify into the FTC State Championship Tournament. The first is to qualify out of one of the major tournaments called Qualifiers such as RoboCATastrophe which was held at Columbia in December. The other route is to qualify out of the Meets which are smaller events. To qualify into the State Tournament a team must essentially be one of the winning teams in the League Meets Championships. League Meets championships are open to teams that have not yet qualified into the state tournament.
Once teams make it to the tournament, they are ranked again. Sort of like “wild card” slots in baseball, the teams were ranked in each league by a points system. The FTC division ranked teams within each of the four leagues by their records in their 10 best matches prior to the League event. The rankings are defined by how many wins in the team’s best 10 matches, giving a win 2 points, a tie 1 point and a loss 0 points. Then teams with same number of wins are ranked by how many points are scored against them in their top ten matches. Since robotics matches are primarily focused on offense, not defense, the theory is that if you win more matches and have a lot of points scored against your team, you are a higher scoring team.
Going into the tournament at River Dell, CHS Team 4102 (seniors) was ranked 1st, Team 7959 (sophomores) was ranked 7th, Team 5332 (juniors) 11th and 9563 (freshmen and middle school) 22nd out of 28.
Playoffs in robotics are a bit complicated. Every robotics match has 4 robots: two vs two. In the playoff rounds, all rounds are best 2 matches out of 3. Top teams pick alliance partners of two more teams. Each team must play in at least one match.
At the tournament Teams 4102 and 7959 made it to the playoff round. Team 4102 and its alliance squared off against the sophomore team and its alliance. Interestingly this was a difficult playoff round – it went to 4 matches as one of them ended in a tie. So Team 4102 and its alliance went to the championship match by defeating Team 7959 2-1-1. Team 4102’s alliance won the championship match by sweeping the other alliance, 2-0.
Based on the championship, Team 4102 qualified into the FTC State Tournament. Team 7959 was picked as two more slots needed to be filled and it had one of the strongest records in the state. They were picked! Team 4102 at the NE League tournament earned the PTC Design award for “industrial design at its best.”
The State Championship is Sunday Feb 26th at West Windsor Plainsboro North High School. It is an all day event. This is the 6th time 4102 has been to the State Tournament out of 7 years of competition. In 2013 (when there were only 4 teams), Team 5332 also went to the tournament and was on the championship alliance, making CHS the the only high school to have two teams share the championship. This year is the 2nd time two teams have gone on to the state championship tournament.
