At the FIRST Robotics Competition, The FIRST Responders (also know as the Beachwood Robotics Team) won the Buckeye Regional Imagery Award. The competition, held from March 28-30 at Cleveland State University’s Wolstien Center, was the culmination of many months of hard work put in by Team #695.

The award crowns the team with the best theme, which must unite team member uniforms, the robot itself, and the pit (the place where the robot stays while not competing) under one common design concept. For Beachwood team #695, this design concept involved firefighters.

“We were trying to think of a name for our robot, and a freshman, joking, said we should call it Fahrenheit 695 (our team number being 695) We started talking about it and decided to have a firefighter theme,” said junior Bijal Patel, who with fellow team member Maya Peleg orchestrated the imagery for the team.

The team wore red suspenders and firefighter hats donated by the fire department. The robot was designed to look like a firetruck and the pit was designed to look like a fire station. Even the team name “FIRST responders” was related to the firefighter theme.

Despite the Bison victory, there were some disappointments. “We did not do as well as we expected,” said team secretary and sophomore Danny Stanescu. The robot itself did not do well enough in its game to move on to the next level of competition.

One reason for this could’ve been the task itself. “This years game was much harder [than last year],” said Patel.

“The tasks this year were for the robot to be able to throw frisbees into targets in the walls that were positioned at three different levels, and for the robot to be able to climb a Jungle Gym type pyramid,” said the team’s mentor, Bob Davis.

Another reason is the robot, which proved difficult to control. “A lot of the problems we had were communication, where we would push buttons and our robot would just sit there and not move,” said Stanescu.

A last problem was that many experienced seniors graduated. “We lost a [lot of]  talent this year. It was really hard to get everything done because almost all of our programmers graduated,” said Patel.

“We graduated more than a dozen members last year, so we lost a great deal of experience,” said Davis.  ” However, this year’s team is every bit as capable of being successful with some more experience.”

Despite these setbacks, the team experienced success and had many strengths, such as adding new sponsors and running a succesful lightbulb fundraiser to raise money for shirts and other supplies.

“We had a captain and mentors that really committed to the team,” Patel added.

Though the season is over, the team’s competitive spirit has hardly died down.  “We have high hopes for next year,” said Stanescu.