Building a robot sounds tricky enough. Building a robot in a matter of weeks and programing it to compete in a highly complicated game seems nearly impossible. However, that is exactly what 21 Edwardsville students did.

Edwardsville Technologies, an Edwardsville-based robotics team, consists of 21 students from Metro East Lutheran High School and EHS. Twelve of the students who are part of the team are from EHS and seniors Colin Hauch and Jacob Waller are team captains.

Each member of the team has worked over the past eight weeks to create a robot for the team to compete at the FIRST Robotics Competition held in St. Louis. The team competed against 49 teams and finished second, a first for the program.

“[I felt] pure excitement, seriously never felt that way before. It just made me want to jump around like a happy little kid,” Waller said.

The team spent nearly 24 hours a week for eight weeks building two identical robots. The team is given a game that changes each year in early January. This year’s game was “FIRST Stronghold.”

“The game is not simple and there are a lot of things to consider, most of which we find out later in the build season,” Hauch said.

The team builds a “to-scale” model of the field pieces used in the large field and electronics and superstructure are designed and installed. Meanwhile students are also writing the code used to drive the robot.

“The goal was to build a robot that could traverse ‘Defenses’ which are various obstacles in place to prevent robots from scoring in goals,” Waller said. “You could get points for scoring in goals, or for going over defenses.”

The team came in second place, just shy of qualifying for the next round. Though their robot will not see competition again, the lessons learned from this experience will be used for many years to come.

“FRC is such a valuable program where I get to learn skills that no other single organization could teach me and serves as a pseudo-company that helps me understand what a career in the engineering world is really like,” Hauch said. “I’ve learned how to apply knowledge I’ve learned in school to real things (such as calculus and physics), how to change a design to work with new problems, how to truly compromise with teammates, and how to trust in my teammates. It is a wonderful organization and I wouldn’t miss participating in it for the world.”