With another competitive season set to begin in early 2015, the boys and girls of the Fountain Hills High School Robotics Club are hard at work building this year’s robots, set to compete at multiple VEX competitions in the coming months with hopes of defending their 2014 state championship and once again going on to compete at the world tournament.

If you head into Building K on the FHHS campus and make your way to the robotics room, you’ll be greeted by a rather unusual site.

The former classroom is now filled with countless pieces of metal, snakes of wire, a large playing field for simulating competitions and dozens of plastic cubes, a key component in this year’s competition.

Each year, VEX creates a series of tasks for students to tackle with a single robot. Participants are then tasked with designing and crafting a bot that meets various parameters and, assuming all goes well, can also pull off the challenges to score points.

Once competition season rolls around, teams meet at various events to pit their creations against other schools and clubs.

Do well enough in the season and you’ll earn an invitation to state. Perform well there, and you could be headed to nationals or even the worldwide competition.

The FHHS Robotics Club has spent the past several months designing and constructing their robots, with a number of teams hoping to take the 2015 season by storm.

Seniors Andrew Cooper and Cameron Ribail are on-hand to help lead the local club this year, with Cooper being part of the club all four years of high school and Ribail joining the team during his junior year.

“I’ve always wanted to be an engineer so, when I heard Dr. Paul [McElligott] was forming a Robotics Club, I thought, yeah, I’ll go check that out,” Cooper said.

“I went in and the first robot I ever saw was this rubber band shooter they had made for fun. I thought that was really cool, so I decided to stick with it.”

Ribail didn’t learn about the Robotics Club until the 2013-14 school year but, once he discovered it, he decided he had to sign up.

“I feel like I kind of missed out on those first two years,” he said.

“What got me interested in robotics was taking the engineering class. Dr. Paul had us build some simple robots and that got me really interested in it, which led me to wanting to become an engineer.”

Last year, the FHHS squad won seven local tournaments and took the state tournament.

Without funding to go to nationals, the team put all of its efforts into competing at the world competition, going on to claim a Create Award for design.

This year, the club is hoping to do just as well, starting from scratch to design new robots to take on a brand new set of tournament goals.

“The robot has to stack eight-inch plastic cubes onto pillars that surround the field, in order to score points,” Cooper explained.

“You can also create a sky rise out of these yellow tubes that can be stacked one on top of the other. Each one you stack gives you points, too.

“You can also stack cubes on your sky rise, which will give you double points.”

Cooper and Ribail agreed that this year’s competition is upping the difficulty factor, requiring a robot that can accomplish multiple functions at once.

Also, in its resting state, the robot can be no bigger than 18 inches, cubed. It’s a tricky set of guidelines, but the club’s bots seem to be coming along nicely.

“Your robot has to run autonomously off of programming for 15 seconds, then you have 1:45 of driver control to score as many points as possible,” Cooper continued.

“So we have to build fast robots that are really efficient.”

Ribail agreed, saying that engineering these types of robots is a rewarding challenge.

“We brainstormed our ideas, decided what might work best, and it’s really fun to go through all of that,” he said.

“There’s also a competitive aspect that we enjoy,” Cooper continued.

“Here, our robot is better than yours because we had a better design and a better strategy. It’s a mental sport, like chess, pitting our best designs against their best designs to see who comes out on top.”

With competitions just over the horizon, expect to hear more about the Robotics Club’s progress as the 2014-15 season gets rolling.