On April 17, members of the Ratchet Rockers, FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) team 1706, loaded on a charter bus and started a long journey to Houston, Texas to compete at the FIRST World Championships. The World Championships hosted teams from Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, the Dominican Republic, India, Israel, Mexico, Turkey and, of course, the United States.

Students arrived in Houston the next morning and, after a 14 hour drive, went straight to the George R. Brown Convention Center to start setting up their pit and get ready for practice matches, in preparation for the qualification matches the next day.

“If you were able to succeed in autonomous, it gave you a leg up over the competition,” junior Maya Angeles said.

Senior and operator, Joey Flynn programmed 27 different autonomous modes for the robot to execute based off of the information given by Field Management System (FMS) at the beginning of each match.

By the end of qualification matches, the Ratchet Rockers were ranked eighth in the Hopper Division with a record of 12-5-0 (wins, losses, ties).

“We’ve gone the furthest we’ve ever gone at Worlds,” senior and Strategy Lead Jacob Clark said.

The Ratchet Rockers made it all the way to the finals of the Hooper division in the third seed with FRC teams 3339 (BumbleB from Israel), 2974 (Walton Robotics from Georgia) and 957 (Swarm from Oregon). They faced the number one seed and lost, 2-0.

While they didn’t continue beyond their division to Einstein, the Ratchet Rockers made history and even got called out in a FIRST podcast by Tyler Olds for being a dark horse in the Hopper division.

“We set the bar high for next season,” sophomore Nathan Stumpf said.