Robotics team advances to state finals

WASILLA — For the first time in school history, the Twindly Bridge Charter School Robotics team advanced to the state finals during competition at Eagle River High school Feb. 15 and 16.

Some 26 teams from Valley, Eagle River, Anchorage, and Soldotna competed in this qualifying event for the FIRST Tech Challenge competition March 8 and 9 at University of Alaska Anchorage.

Inventor and entrepreneur Dean Kamen founded FIRST nearly 20 years ago, creating a school-to-career pipeline through which young people are inspired to explore opportunities in science and technology.

Twindly’s Team Entropy includes members, Captain Shane Preuit, Lorne Focht, Caleb Webber, Josh Weber, Caleb Richardson, Tyler Kelly, Seth Figon, Mathew Ganchenko.

As a consistent scorer in all of its matches during the all-day event, Team Entropy included was picked to compete in the finals as an alliance partner to the fourth-place team. This alliance beat the first-place seed in the first round of the finals. The second round was very close, the first match going to our alliance but the next two went to our opponent in very close matches.

The Twindly Bridge team also was a runner up for the Rockwell Collins Innovate Award, given to the best-designed robot.

The Twindly team consists of home-schooled students who meet at the school for 10 to 15 hours each week to work on their robot. Many hours of computer programming also went into being able to compete in this competition. The boys have learned to use RobotC computer language to program.

For more information, visit fllalaska.com/about.