EDMONDS, Washington (STPNS) -- The CyberKnights and CyberDaze robotics teams (varsity and JV) from King’s School are headed to St. Louis to compete against other teams from around the world.

Wednesday, the King's High School robotics team, which won the state title in January, flew out of Seattle on the way to St. Louis to compete in the FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) World Championship, which begins Wednesday and continues through Saturday.

The students have completed more than 15,000 man-hours of planning, developing and building working robots to showcase in the international competition.



The King’s Robotics and FIRST Tech programs provide students with hands-on science and technology experience and access to college scholarships.

The teams will be driving an 18-inch-square cube they have made for the competition. Robots are given commands by wireless controllers from computers.

During the 3-minute competition, the team will try to insert a handball into each of three small crates, stack the crates, then lift them up without spilling them.

The first 30 seconds of each match are run in automatron-mode, pre-programmed. Then the students take control.

Lifting higher gains more points.

The King’s teams can lift the crates 14 feet in the air.

“The world record for this event is 711 points,” said Mike Thompson, King’s High School teacher and head coach of the robotics team.

“The way our robots are built, we’ve been getting around 800 points in practice. We got it right, I think.”

The varsity and junior varsity robotics teams put the final touches on their robots on Monday, April 16, then practiced one last time before shipping the robots the next day.

How stiff is the competition at the First Tech Challenge and what are the benefits of competing?

The Challenge will host 2,100 teams and 21,000 students from the U.S., Canada, Mexico and the Netherlands.

And the FIRST Tech program provides students with hands-on science and technology experience and access to more than $9.7 million in college scholarships for 2012.

Last year, the King’s High School junior varsity team finished among the top eight teams in the world.

Coach Thompson has even higher hopes for this year.