By:Nick Buglione
Over 10,000 spectators gathered at Suffolk Community College's campus in Brentwood to watch Clarke compete against 36 other Long Island high schools.
"The winners demonstrated tremendous teamwork, professionalism and strategic thinking to overcome the challenges of the competition," said Fred Breithut, president of the School-Business Partnerships of Long Island, which sponsored the event.
The FIRST, For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, robotics competition is in its 16th year and challenges students and their professional mentors to design a robot out of a kit of parts and a standard set of rules that solves a specific problem posed.
Last year Clarke, which prides itself on its pre-engineering program, took home top honors at the regional competition.
Although they didn't come in first, this year's team did particularly well.
The students, under the instruction of teacher Mike Conners, spent six weeks conceptualizing and building their robot. The result was a creation the students affectionately nicknamed "The Schwartz," a term pulled from the 1980s movie comedy Space Balls."
This year-s regional competition entries were judged on their performance in a game where the robots released and corralled balls to their human operators, who in turn shot those balls into baskets for points. A pull-up bar was hung in the playing field, and extra points were given to any robot that could reach up and hang from it.
Clarke finished as second finalist and won the Motorola Quality Award, which honors the most robust robot, fit to stand up to the competition's rigors.
The team will now take its robot to the FIRST national championships, to be held in the Georgia Dome in Atlanta from April 15 to 17. The school-s victory at last year-s regionals already guaranteed it a spot at this year-s national competition.
