WMS Robotics and Their Recent Competition

West Middle School’s robotics team recently participated in an FTC competition (FIRST Tech Challenge), but what do we build? How does the robot even do anything? As an active member of our robotics team, I’m here to answer these questions.

Our robotics team is named the Irondogs, and we placed #15th out of 35 in our last competition, held at Troy High School in Michigan. The competition was streamed on Twitch and is now uploaded to YouTube. The link to the stream is at the bottom of the article if you would like to watch us. 🙂 The qualifiers we played in were 5, 10, 19, 27, and 40.

The Irondogs are split into three different teams: the coders, the builders, and the marketers. The coders create programs using block programming to tell the robot to do things such as move, turn, strafe, and score. The coders are entirely in charge of the autonomous mode, which is used in the first thirty seconds of the match, a period in which the robot acts without human input. The coders also make the teleop code.

The building team designs the robot and builds it. This year, the build team created a model out of cardboard, CAD, and finally, GoBuilda parts. The builder built the intake, lift, and launcher. We settled on a shuriken design for the intake, which effectively pulls artifacts (the balls used to score points) into the robot. The tank tread lift was built to grip the artifacts to reliably lift them to the launcher. We used a wheel launcher, one wheel controlled with a servo, and another wheel that didn’t spin to give the ball more speed upon launching, the stationary wheel bouncing the artifact along with the spinning wheel.

Finally, the marketing team. The marketing team helps to attract teams to our stand so that we can compete alongside them. We had a Plinko game with prizes such as candy, pins, and 3d prints. We also had a slideshow running that would tell everyone about our team. Our marketing team got a lot of sponsors, raising around 600$.

Overall, we had a great competition and were happy with where we placed and our robot. If you have any questions, feel free to post them in the comments, and I will get to them as soon as possible. 🙂

Works Cited:

The Irondogs Team

The May 2026 Competition

(There is a problem with the link above; it starts nine hours into the video, so just restart it if you want.)