In St. Louis it will all be a matter of focus for Tahoma High’s robotics team.

The club of 39 members will take the lessons it learned at regional competitions in Seattle and Portland with it to the national FIRST Robotics event in Missouri, explained junior Mark Eads.

“In Seattle we didn’t do very well because when we were in the pits preparing our robot, we didn’t look over everything with the robot and we would send it out with broken parts and it would basically sit there,” Eads said. “If we can improve it even more, I think we have a good chance of getting into the final field, if we can just focus. This robot was designed to work splendidly and it can if we just let it.”

Since 2007 the club, advised by Tahoma High science teacher Darren Collins, has competed in FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) competitions.

FIRST was started by Dean Kamen in 1989 as a way to get kids interested in science and technology, Collins explained, and has grown from a couple dozen teams to more than 2,500 around the world.

Initially the club had to travel out of state to compete as there were 13 teams in Washington state so Bear Metal, as the robotics club has dubbed itself, would travel to Portland, Ore., to take on teams from California, Oregon, Montana and Idaho.

Collins said in the past few years The Boeing Co. has invested heavily in high school teams as a sponsor which has helped the activity grow significantly in Washington state. There are more than 80 teams here now.

Each year the competition is different, Collins said, with the national organization giving out a prompt on the game on the first Saturday in January. This year the game is called Logomotion.

The game lasts a couple of minutes and pits an alliance of three teams against another alliance on a 27 foot by 54 foot field using robots that weigh 120 pounds.

There are two different parts to the competition this year. The first part involves alliances operating their robots from behind a fence at either end of the field. There are scoring grids located in front of the alliance stations that face the field. Full size robots are used to get triangular shaped tubes onto the scoring grids.

The second piece of the competition involves a mini bot which is deployed by the larger robot. It then climbs and pole on the field. The mini bot that gets to the top of its pole the quickest during the final 15 seconds of the competition gets bonus points, said junior Alivia Ward.

Ward explained that the team has “made numerous different types of mini bots.”

Once teams got the prompt for the game in January they had six weeks to design and build a robot as well as a mini bot.

Eads said Bear Metal approached the design and build process by breaking up into five separate units with each responsible for a different aspect of the robot.

“Each one was separate from another so instead of having to design an entire robot they only had to design one part of a robot,” Eads said. “That let us come up with much better designs. Every part of our robot is high class.”

From there, the team that designed and build the chassis was responsible for ensuring seamless integration of the distinct parts of the robot into one cohesive unit.

Elizabeth Burianek, a junior, further explained the process.

“Each team has a mix of people who have specialties in all fields, design, fabrication, programming, electrionics,” Burianek said. “He gave us the prompt then that afternoon we started brainstorming. Over the next couple weeks we worked on designing it then we worked on prototypes and what materials we could use and if we had to weight reduce.”

After four weeks work was nearly done so they spent the final two weeks tweaking the design before it had to be packed up in preparation for the regional competition in Seattle.

Though Bear Metal didn’t win either of the regional events it competed in the team earned its ticket to St. Louis by winning the Engineering Inspiration award in Seattle, Eads said, by demonstrating to the judges the team’s willingness to help other clubs who weren’t as prepared for the competition or offered to work on other club’s robots.

This weekend the club will be competing against teams from all over the country with the hope to qualify well and eventually be on the winning alliance in the semi-regional to move on the final round.

Focus will be key, Burianek said, and the plan is to be more organized in the pits with a white board and members who are designated to check over the robot and tick off items on the check list on the white board before a match.

“Between Portland and now, we’ve reorganized how our pits will be set up,” Burianek said.

The opportunity to go to the national competition is significant for both Eads and Burianek.

Burianek learned about the robotics club as a ninth grader at Tahoma Junior High but took his sophomore year off as he adjusted to high school as well as the demands of Advanced Placement courses.

“This year I had to do, I missed it last year,” she said. “Robotics helped me develop more leadership skills, definitely more communication skills.”

It’s also helped her to be more flexible in her thinking, a skill which may help next week when she and Eads take the AP Calculus exam, just days after they return from the national robotics competition.

Eads first got involved in robotics as a ninth grader and was one of the first members to join at the junior high.

“It was great,” he said. “It got me prepared for this. We’re excited to be there. It’s my first time. Overall for most of us, it’s our first time. We went our first year, our second year, but we didn’t go our third year. So, we’re pretty excited because some of our seniors haven’t been.”

And though they’ll be excited you can expect the members of Bear Metal to have carried those lessons with them to St. Louis. Tahoma Robotics will be focused.