M-SET Robotics won the Inspire award for the first time at the FIRST Tech Competition (FTC) Sequoia Redwood City Qualifier on Nov. 4. At this competition, teams built robots to complete a task called relic recovery and competed for awards to qualify for the regional tournament.

FTC hardware lead junior Derek Chiou said, “[Winning the award] felt pretty great because we were a relatively new team the past two years.”

Additionally, M-SET Robotics set a California high score record of 300 points in a match.

They qualified for the regional tournament by hosting a qualifier on Nov. 19. They are now preparing for the regional tournament on the weekend of March 17 by changing their robot’s design.

Chiou said, “We're preparing [for regionals] by redesigning our robot to make it complete tasks faster in order to compete with the other robots.”

FTC software lead sophomore Sahaj Rastogi feels that the team is in a good position going into regionals.

“I feel pretty strong about going into regionals and i think that our team will do well. All in all, I feel that we will do good at regionals,” Rastogi said.