September of 2022 marked the beginning of Goose’s life in the FTC Robotics world. Goose the robot was built within eight weeks after the kickoff of their season in September and garnered its name because of its resemblance to the animal.

Goose carried the team to victory at the FTC 5A UIL State Championship on March 24 and qualified for Worlds, which will be held on April 18-22 in Houston at the George R Brown Convention Center. The FTC team spends a lot of time together and that contributed to the feeling of the win, according to senior and FTC president, Austin Jia.

“It was super cool,” Jia said. “Seeing others advance and great teams not advancing last year made it feel almost impossible. We all spent a lot of time together after school to make it possible, so progressing as a group is awesome.”

Jia has been committed to the robotics team since his freshman year.

“I just like the idea that you can build whatever you want, and nobody is telling you what to do,” Jia said. “If you have an idea, we have all the machines you would ever need to make it happen. So now, we’re just making sure that our robot is in peak condition and just practicing driving a lot, so we can do as good as we can.”

It felt good to win the UIL competition, according to Jia, but there were a lot of steps before getting to that point. Everything started after the kickoff of the season. The team began to plan out the model of the robot initially using drawings on napkins, according to Software Head John Matistic, and then transferred their ideas into a 3D model. Then the coding for the robot began on GitHub, essentially a google doc for code, which is shared between Jia and Matistic.

“I’ll do one day and then I’ll upload everything we did that day online so we can keep a copy online with separate copies of different kinds of experiments and things like that,” Matistic said. “[We code] the program, so how it moves or like how it moves on its own, or how it would know where it is. Things like that, like its brain.”

The next step of bringing the robot into fruition is gathering the money to put it together. The robotics team raised around $15,000 for this season, which is more than 10 times the $500 that was raised last year. The new booster club had a huge part in helping raise money, but Project Manager and senior Delaney Deruiter played a role in it as well.

“I overlook the entire team,” Deruiter said. “I make sure that everyone is on schedule, I plan all of the events, I schedule all of the meetings, I communicate with people not on the team like outreach committees, then I also communicate with people on the team. I have been working a lot with business this year. So, what that has entailed is a lot of fundraiser stuff. This year has been a big improvement in money and fundraising-wise, and that’s what I’ve been mostly doing.”

Once the team gathered the money to start building the robot, they got to work using a mix of 3D printed materials and materials bought with the money they raised. The first version of the robot is never the same as the last. Many changes have been made continuously over the season to help improve the robot. Any imperfections of the robot are sought out and improved, according to Matistic.

“For our claw where we grip the game pieces with, we used to use 3D printed material, then we put rubber bands on because we can have tension then they’ll grip easier since rubber bands are slightly sticky,” Matistic said. “Then we decided to custom mold silicone because silicone is really grippy. So we did that on our claw, and those three versions are what we’ve done. We do that for every part of our robot.”

The team is now preparing for the World robotics competition after school every Thursday. Jia remembers how satisfying the win felt and uses that to motivate him, as well as the rest of the team, for future competitions.

“It was pretty good to win,” Jia said “The competition for UIL state is a lot more lax than the normal robotics state, and it’s just lower stakes, so it wasn’t that stressful, but it still felt nice to win.”