After their elimination in the New England FIRST District Championship, Algonquin’s robotics team is looking towards next year with hope.

At the championship from April 3-6, the team, known as Team 1100 or Inverse Polarity, ended their qualification matches with a record of 5-7. However, the team still made the playoffs, as they were chosen to participate in Alliance Six by the Ipswich Tigers, a team from Ipswich, Massachusetts. Although the alliance lost its first two games in the double-elimination playoffs, senior captain Mustafa Ahmed has found great success through the team’s growth.

“Even with a couple of bumps throughout our season, we have done well and learned a lot,” Stewart said via email.

“We used a different driving type called swerve drive, which is how spinny chairs work,” Ahmed said. “They have caster wheels on all four sides but on a swerve drive robot, those wheels are motorized so you can move in every direction. It’s called a holonomic drive. It was a big challenge because we’ve never done it before.”

Senior captain Autumn Stewart also views the season as an innovative success.

Beyond engineering breakthroughs, Team 1100 experienced an influx of freshman members, showing promise for the near future.

“Last year all of our team was seniors,” Ahmed said. “[Sophomore team member] Anthea Sun recruited a bunch of freshmen, and they all recruited more freshmen. Now we have a lot of freshmen on the team which is really good because we will have a strong team the next four years.”

Sun is also excited by the large freshmen population on the team.

“I think why we’re so good is because we’ve prioritized passing down information to underclassmen,” Sun said.

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“I’m excited to see [the freshmen] grow with the things they’ve learned this season and use them next year and the year after that,” Sun said. “I’m very proud of them.”

Making it to the District Championship was no easy feat, and Sun sees their success this year as a good sign for the future.

One of those underclassmen is freshman Caitlin Palmer, who learned important skills on this year’s highly successful software team. In fact, at their competition during week five at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, the team won an award for exceptional programming. Palmer is hopeful to see the team’s continued success in the future.

“I’m excited to see where [the team] goes,” Palmer said. “Knowing that we went so far last year and we can do that again, continue to do better and keep going is really exciting.”