On May 11, 2024, The Mamaroneck Robotics Team participated in Marine Advanced Technology Education (MATE) ROV RANGER class competition.

Held at Villanova University in Philadelphia, the team competed against other middle and high school teams from around the region across several metrics, most of which are based on real world need for aquatic environmental actions, such as maintaining undersea cables or surveying populations.

While at the competition, the Mamaroneck Tiger Sharks won an award for their engineering presentation. The team has been competing for over nine years in both the FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) and the MATE competitions. Although Mamaroneck High School (MHS) did not originally have an engineering program, computer science students approached their teacher at the time, Dr. Jigar Jadav, about creating a robotics team. From a core group of around 2-3 students, it has now expanded into a thriving congregation of students who are passionate about STEM.

Year after year, the team has participated in FIRST’s (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Tech Challenge, where high school students are challenged to “design, build, program, and operate robots to compete in a head-to-head challenge in an alliance format” (FIRST Tech Challenge). A few years into the program, members introduced the idea of MATE to James Love, the engineering teacher at MHS and the current advisor for the robotics team.

With the start of COVID-19 in 2020, both the FTC and MATE competitions were canceled, and what Love describes as “institutional knowledge” was interrupted. “We had a whole cycle of people who grew out of the program before they were able to pass the information down,” he said. While this did pose a significant challenge to incoming members, the club’s leadership helped get the team back on its feet.

One of the more pressing matters was that the “schedule was all over the place and it wasn’t organized in the sense that people didn’t really know where we met” says Alondra Avila (’24). To combat this, the team implemented a new schedule and utilized Google Classroom and Google Chat.

Despite increased communication, the issue of location continued to arise. With the construction of the new STEAM Co-Lab, the usual robotics meeting and testing space was gone. Instead, the robot had to be built and tested in the engineering room while it was still functioning as a classroom.

“I remember that last year, the night before the competition was the only day that we could set up our playing field” said Avila(’24). Due to the FTC robot’s special wheels, it can only run on special mats, which couldn’t be put down in the limited space of the engineering room. Once the Co-Lab was complete, however, a multitude of opportunities were opened for the robot.

One of these was participation in the MATE competition, which was entirely dropped after COVID. Last year, however, Max Lazarus (’25) and Miles Contopolous (’25) explain that they “wanted to do [the competition] a lot so [they] got a couple friends together and decided to try to get it back up and running” stated Lazarus.

The process of building a functioning robot is a long one, even with the incredible resources offered by the STEAM Co-Lab. “Students who do it realize how difficult and challenging it can be and how much time and effort goes into making progress,” explains Love. The procedure begins with initial brainstorming, and engineers then use Fusion 360 Computer Aided Design (CAD) software to model the robot in a 3D space. From there, the building and coding can begin.

In the case of this year’s MATE robot, team members examined last year’s pitfalls in order to better design and build the robot. While last year’s software was built in the Python coding language, this year’s was rebuilt using the faster C++. Instead of relying on PVC pipes like last year, the team decided to utilize parts they could make themselves using the Co-Lab’s new machines. Because “a lot of the parts are really precise,” being able to manufacture their own elements “helped a lot” says Lazarus.

Participants in the MATE competition are awarded points for the presentation of their robot, their team’s marketing, and the robot’s completion of four different tasks. This year’s tasks were simulating relocating an oceanographic data collection network, equipping undersea cables with data collection sensors, and maintaining coral reef and lake sturgeon population health.

In addition, teams had the option of designing a separate data collection float. The Mamaroneck Tiger Sharks put their robot to the test twice at the competition after a brief opening ceremony. Between time periods to complete tasks, the team worked on fixing any problems that arose, as well as giving a detailed overview of the robot and the process to make it to a panel of judges.

Out of the 13 teams present at the competition, MHS’s team won an award for their presentation. Although a long time goal has been to get to a national competition, Mr. Love is also looking ahead to when “the team grows and we bring in new people who are eager to learn about what we are trying to do and not afraid to put in hard work to get to competitions and get the robots competition ready.” As the years go on, the team just continues to “keep growing and [get] better,” both because of the increasing opportunities to actualize designs, but also because “the community is always super supportive” said Love.

The Mamaroneck Robotics team is always open to anyone with an interest in STEM, regardless of their experience, and new people are essential to continue such an incredible program at the high school and bring their accomplishments to new heights in the coming years.