Thursday, October 1, 2026
Innovo, one of four robotics teams at Hewlett High School, clinched their qualifying competition and took home the first place First Inspire Award.
Innovo joins the three other robotics teams offered at Hewlett — Bionica, Nexus and Roboboogie.
The 15-member team is lead by Daniel Duffey-Birkenstock and is the second oldest team, formed seven years ago. The oldest team is Roboboogie.
The qualifiers were held at Bay Port Blue Point High School, on Dec. 7.
“Team Innovo really had a strong showing,” Birkenstock said. “They ended up winning the competition bracket and were also awarded the Inspire Award.”
Their big win earned Innovo a spot in the Long Island Championship on March 1.
“Since this was the first qualifiers, they have two additional qualifiers they will be attending in order to improve their initial design,” he said. “Anything that they weren’t 100 percent happy with and needs room for improvement, they have the opportunity to improve without the worry of qualifying.”
Birkenstock said the team is in a good position this season and they received good comments from the judges.
Innovo’s build this year is called the “Funnel Cake” because it depends on a funnel on top. This year, teams have options for two ways of collecting artifacts. The robots can collect it itself through an intake mechanism or the human player can load the artifact.
“Instead of building out an intake mechanism, they focused entirely on the accuracy of their launch,” Birkenstock added. “In this years game, the artifacts are like wiffle balls and they have to launch it basketball-style into a basket.”
Teams earned points based for doing it in a certain order and time limit.
“The students recognized that their human player is far more reliable than anything they can build in the intervened time,” he said. “It ended up being the right move, they scored really high in each match and won each round. ‘Funnel Cake’ brought them the gold.”
Innovo team member and robotics treasurer, Micah Newman, has been on the team for three years and is a junior at Hewlett.
“Innovo has been one of the most fundamental aspects of my time in high school and robotics in general,” Newman said. “We have our own little family as a team and through the ups and downs of being on that team, it’s been essential to me as a person.”
He said that competing at qualifiers was a mountain of excitement as they kept winning brackets even though they started off towards the bottom.
“We didn’t do as well as we hoped in the first game and barely scraped out a win,” he said. “From there we kept getting better, improved a lot of aspects over the course of the day to the point where we got to the best we could’ve been.”
Newman said his favorite part of going to qualifiers is how much everyone comes together and seeing friends from other schools.
“The sense of community that you get at those qualifies is not parallel anywhere else,” Newman said.
Mohammad Faiz, Innovo’s head of portfolio and robotics secretary, has also been involved for three years and is a junior.
“They’ve been very welcoming and over the years I have taken a more prominent role in portfolio and documenting everything we’ve done on the team,” Faiz said.
Faiz said that the judging went well at qualifies and the team was undefeated the whole day.
“Being undefeated opens us up to more awards,” he said. “It shows that our robot is more reliable and what we’re showing in our portfolio isn’t false.”
