Courtesy of Mary Ko

MSET senior mentor Anh-Quan Nguyen described the team’s performance as “the best performance of any Cuttlefish team in history.” MSET senior mentor Anh-Quan Nguyen described the team’s performance as “the best performance of any Cuttlefish team in history.”

Every year, at least 50,000 high school students and their mentors and chaperones pack the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston for the FIRST world championship competition. 

In the convention center, FIRST hosts concurring World Championships for three different programs, including the First Robotics Challenge (FRC), the First Lego League (FLL) and First Tech Challenge (FTC), a competition with compact robots — no more than 18 inches in height, width and depth — for precise tasks. 

For one sleepless week, 256 of the world’s most elite FTC teams from over 66 countries came together to present their creations, inspire others through their outreach and compete head-to-head with robots they’ve spent months perfecting in an effort to win awards and succeed over competition. Ultimately, one alliance, made up of three teams, wins the tournament.

This year, Cuttlefish exceeded expectations, placing 9th out of 64 in the Jemison Division. Winning 8 of 10 matches, the team easily surpassed their previous best 3-5 win-loss record. The team’s senior mentor, Anh-Quan Nguyen, dubbed the team’s performance as “the best performance of any Cuttlefish team in history.” Even before they attended, it was already a notable year; they qualified for their fifth World Championship in team history, having previously qualified in 2019, 2021, 2022 and 2023. 

The school’s 14-member FTC robotics team, 6165 Cuttlefish, consists of seniors Ethan Yang, Aadit Noronha, Asheeka Noronha and Manlin Zhang, juniors Florence Hu, Eric Woo-Shem, Willis Chung and Arista Suvarna and sophomores Renisha Mandal, Vedant Sinha, Benjamin Guo, Alan Rong and Maxwell Tham.

Throughout the 4-day event, which ran from April 16-19, the team competed in 10 qualification matches, gave presentations to judges and shared their culture with teams from around the world. The tournament’s overall winning alliance included Colorado’s Up-A-Creek Robotics, India’s Team Matrix and Texas’s BrainSTEM Robotics Team.

The game manual to this year’s FTC game “INTO THE DEEP”

 Because of their small size, FTC robots usually have sophisticated, compact designs.

This season’s FTC game, “INTO THE DEEP,” was inspired by ocean exploration. Teams tried to score points by having their robot deposit rectangular objects, called “samples,” into a basket. Another way to score was by having a team member attach a hook to a sample, making a game element called a sample, and then picking them up with the robot and hooking them onto a bar. 

A standard FTC game is divided into a 30-second autonomous period, where robots are run entirely from code, and a 2-minute driver period, where drivers control the robot. The driver period also includes a 30-second endgame period where robots can choose to hang on a lower bar or higher bar in the ascent zone in order to score extra points.

At the World Championships, the top eight teams at the end of the 10 qualification matches become captains and choose two other teams to be part of an alliance. 

The Cuttlefish played strong qualification and elimination matches

The Cuttlefish started strong with three straight wins before falling short by 7 points in their fourth qualification match. During this game, the Cuttlefish suffered the greatest gap in points during the autonomous period, where their consistency faulted for the first time, only scoring 10 points compared to the usual 48. 

Sophomore Alan Rong, who is in charge of attaching clips to make specimens, felt that it was a match that could have drastically changed the results for the team, possibly placing them in the top three of their division.

“We were essentially in a two-versus-one situation, giving us a really good chance of winning, so it was a shame that we lost,” Rong said. “To me, that was the only qualification that we honestly lost due to mistakes.”

During their sixth match, the Cuttlefish put up a division high score of 466 points. They were allied with first-ranked team 16460 GEarheads, a specimen team that was extremely consistent. 

But in their last qualifying match, the Cuttlefish fell short to 18270 RoboPlayers (ranked 5th), ending with a 8-2 record and falling from 3rd in their division to 9th.

“I felt pretty good about the qualification matches. A lot of them were really close, especially based on OPR (Offensive Power Rating),” said senior Ethan Yang, the team’s Driver 1. 

In alliance selection, they were chosen by 4348 RoboKnights, ranked 7th, due to their complementary specimen-scoring capabilities. RoboKnights also decided to pick the third member in their alliance as 10298 Brainstormz, ranked 43rd, all together forming the 6th seeded alliance. For Yang, this was an expected but disappointing outcome as the team was unable to ally with their top choices.

In the elimination matches, the team went 0-2, losing 482-410 and 354-352. Their losses came against the fourth-seeded and second-seeded alliances.

“Perhaps more practice [with our alliances] would’ve helped,” Yang said. “We also asked our partner to do defense, but in hindsight, we should’ve worked with them ahead of time to prepare for that role. Asking a team to try something new without proper preparation wasn’t ideal, and it likely impacted how things played out.”

The Cuttlefish execute a successful presentation and enjoy the competition’s pit culture

Alongside the actual competition, each team must do a 5-minute presentation and 10-min Q&A with a set of interview judges. The presentation is similar to an elevator pitch, where teams give context on their hardware, software and outreach efforts, allowing for interview judges to ask more focused questions and explore aspects of the team that could lead to pit judges. Pit judges then go to a team’s pit — their home base during the competition — to ask more questions about the team’s robot and presentation.

In the pit, the Cuttlefish set up an overhead tent decorated with various posters. They also created a Polaroid board as well as handing out buttons, pins and flags.

Although the team did not make it far in eliminations, their 8-2 record was the best in their history. The team also won the Judges’ Choice Award for their presentation and pit. 

Looking forward, the team hopes to be an alliance captain in their division next year.

“An 8-2 record is something I’m proud of,” Yang said. “We’ve never done that well before. I was a little surprised and honestly a bit disappointed that it only ranked us 9th, but I’m happy with how we played, and I hope the team continues to improve throughout the years.”