COURTESY PHOTO
Malden High Robotics Club advisor Chris Bazzinotti and Malden students are shown at the International Botball Tournament held this past week in Norman, Okla.
MALDEN — They fell short in the end, but the city’s high school robotics team marched over global competitors during this week’s International Botball Tournament.
They had already pushed the envelope by winning the school’s first New England Regional Botball Championship. Little did they know they would not only knock off the top-seeded team in the world and then advance to the Elite Eight in the world before bowing to a former, recent World Champion.
What a week in Norman, Okla., for the students from Malden.
“It was a great showing and despite the intensity, it was a lot of fun and very satisfying for our students,” said Chris Bazzinotti, a Malden High technology teacher who serves as advisor to the Robotics Team.
When the students won the New England title in May, they immediately began a fundraising drive which raised nearly $8,000 to fund the trip to the Midwest to participate in the International Botball Championship, where teams from around the world battled for the world crown in a competition hosted by the Global Conference on Educational Robotics (GCER).
According to the Botball Educational Robotics Program “Botball competitions revolve around using student-made robots to complete a series of tasks, such as collecting objects and moving them to another location or recognizing certain color objects and sorting them, within a set time limit of two minutes. Sensors and cameras give input to the robots, which help to identify objects.”
Between competitions, participants program the robots using an Integrated Development Environment.
The Malden High Robotics team was seeded 33rd in the 64-team competition and came out of the gate with a win over a team from a People’s Republic of China middle school affiliated with Qingdao University. The Chinese team came in as the 32nd seed.
Up next for Malden was the tall task of facing off against the number one-seeded team in the competition, former two-time world champion Los Altos (Calif.) Community School.
“They were aware of the competition, but our students were in there with confidence,” Bazzinotti said.
Malden High ended up with a huge win when the top-seeded Los Altos team and Malden advanced to the “Sweet Sixteen,” — this time against Talenthaus from Germany. Malden again prevailed and moved on to the fabled “Elite Eight” where they faced off against the Dead Robots Society team of northern Virginia.
Malden’s luck finally ran out as the Dead Robots Society squad prevailed and moved into the Final Four. The local students could take some consolation knowing the team that knocked them out of the International Tournament, Dead Robots Society, advanced all the way to the final and were crowned World Champions for the first time since 2013.
All in all, quite a summer feat with an international flair for some students from Malden out in the Midwest.
