The South River High PowerHawks Robotics team got the word from FIRST Robotics in mid-January, that the team had until Feb. 22 to come up with a robot for "Logomotion," a challenge where robots have to place various inflated plastic shapes (triangles, circles and squares) on padded pegs on a 27-foot by 54-foot arena. Each robot competes against two other robots so there is an offensive component to the game and a defensive component.

The powerhawks team is made up of about two dozen students who will spend the next few weeks holed up every evening and on weekends in the school's engineering department building their robot from scratch.

In the first two weeks, they came up with two working prototypes. Both were set on aluminum frames, and worked off remotely-controlled joysticks or controllers. Madi was a robot who was a tank drive machine, while Patty was a mechanim drive robot.

After weekend tests, Patty became the robot of choice.

Although their competition in Baltimore isn't until mid-March, they must ship 90 percent of their robot's component parts out by Feb. 22. They will again compete in Richmond during the first weekend in April.

The FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics competition is the brainchild of Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway personal transport machine. Kamen wanted to create a competition for students in science and engineering that would give them the opportunity to compete like athletes—where families could come out to cheer them on and even cheerleaders could show up to wave school colors.

In an interview with The Economist, Kamen said that First Robotics is his proudest achievement. Since 1989, nearly 1 million students have participated.

At South River, the team gathers daily—for at least two hours each day—to work on the robot. Patty will be built and tested, taken apart, rebuilt, and tested and tested and tested.

The team is divided into sub-teams, each with its own captain. There is a build team, a drive team, a controller team, a programming team, a business team and an animation team.

The three-dozen members of the team are guided by a group of mentors—engineers and NEMOs (Non-Enginnering Mentors)—who try to guide the students without taking over the project.

Matt Parangot, a senior, is the programming team captain. He has been participating in robotics since he was in the ninth grade.

"What I like is bringing the robot to life," Parangot said, adding that he would really like to go to Georgia Tech to study digital media.

For now though, the group is focused on working together to ensure that Patty can put those inflatable triangles onto the pegs and prevent another robot—one they have no idea about—from doing the same.