Tremont robotics team wins at the Olympics! (or the equivalent of).
"More than 20,000 students from 42 countries gathered in St. Louis over the weekend to battle robots. None were better than a small group of kids from Tremont.
Tremont High School’s Roboteers Team 2481 on Saturday was part of a 4-team coalition that took first place at the FIRST Robotics Competition, beating out more than 2,875 teams that battled in more than 13,000 competitions worldwide for a shot at the title.
Billed as a “sport for the mind,” the FIRST Competition — which stands for For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology — pits “alliances” of four teams each against one another in a battle of wits, strategy, scouting and coordination.
“It was surreal,” said Andrew Hellrigel outside a packed-house celebration for the team on Sunday at Tremont High School.
Hellrigel, who is one of the team’s drivers, said they were underdogs going into the matchup.
Their final opponents included teams from Canada and Israel that have historically been very successful at robotics competitions, he said.
“They build insane robots,” team operator Braden Nafziger said of the opponents he faced.
At the end of the day, however, it was a team of 28 students from Tremont that, with the help of their alliance members, were the victors.
After partnering with teams from Ohio, California and Virginia, the Tremont Roboteers were able to outsmart their opponents — nicknamed by Nafziger as the “Foreign Alliance” — in a battle that centered around using robots to maneuver defenses and shoot “boulders” into the opponents’ tower.
The road to victory, however, started long before the match Saturday.
Teams must exhaustively scout their opponents’ robots, picking out vulnerabilities and then forming a cohesive strategy to exploit them. Going into this weekend, that meant scouring videos of about 75 different robots battling at competitions around the world.
“You have to find out everything you can in order to make a strategy,” Roboteers mentor Tim Koch said Sunday. “Often times, it’s strategy that wins the game.”
The Roboteers’ future looks bright. They’ll only lose three from their team, which is made up largely of underclassmen.
Koch said they’ll lose a lead programmer and scouter, but thinks they’ll be able to find solid replacements.
“We call that succession planning in the corporate world,” he said.
Tremont School District 702 Superintendent Jeff Hinman called the robotics program, which receives sponsorships from local businesses and pairs mentors with eager students, an “amazing” experience.
Because of the mentors involved, Hinman said, students are “actually doing the work. … We just believe it’s a very valuable program.” "
www.pjstar.com/news/ 20160501/tremonts-ro boteers-part-of-winn ing-coalition-a 
