Building a winning culture at Hewlett's robotics team

Hewlett High School’s Roboboogie robotics team continued its winning ways as they first qualified by capturing second place in the top award category, Inspire, on Saturday at last weekend’ tournament hosted by Sewanhaka High School.

Roboboogie, two-time competitors at the FIRST World Championships in Houston, also won second place in the Motivate category and took third in the Think category on Jan. 13. The team has qualified for the Long Island Regional Championship.

On Sunday, Roboboogie took the first place Motivate Award, second in Think and third in Inspire, competing against 16 new teams.

Hewlett High’s Team Bionica also competed on Sunday and according to robotics coach Janine Torresson, Bionica impressed with their knowledge and enthusiasm. The squad took their first place Think Award on both days.

“In my now nine years of coaching HHS robotics, I believe we won the Think Award only once before,” Torresson said in a news release. “It is a demanding category as it must document the engineering journey of the robot from hopeful brainstorming to hard lessons learned when taking it off the page and onto the field.”

Team 5477, Innovo, also competed in its first tournament ranked 10th overall, as all three Hewlett squads ranked in the top 25 to 50 percent of the robot scores, Torresson said, however only Bionica’s robot became a captain of an alliance team in the semifinals. Their robot finished sixth out of 18 on Sunday.

All three teams will compete at Locust Valley High School next month. The Long Island Regional Championships are at Mineola High School on March 3.