This year, with new freshmen joining the team, along with experienced returning participants, the robotics team has big plans for how to live up to last year’s success. Robotics dominated their last season with fourth place in the Archimedes division in the national championships on April 24-27.

“We have a lot of returning veterans and we have a really strong senior class,” robotics teacher Morgan Norman said. “The other factors that I think play into it is that our numbers continue to increase, so we have experience. In past years we didn’t have a lot of returning students.”

The robotics team has three major events and many goals for the upcoming year, including a return visit to the national championships. Another goal is to work with the program at the middle schools to help develop the teams throughout the district.

“We continue to work on trying to build the pipeline from seventh grade through 12^thgrade,” Norman said.

Some aspects of the robotics team is to help young students learn important life lessons, get them interested in engineering and help them have fun and get involved in school activities.

“I think the goal of the Westlake High School robotics program is to teach students how to problem solve and use real world experience in engineering,” senior Jake Cooper said.