The Palo Alto High School robotics team placed 182nd out of 400 teams at the For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) National Championship in St. Louis, Mo. this past weekend.

The team won three out of four of Thursday’s qualification rounds, but did not fare as well on Friday and Saturday.

“Friday and Saturday rounds didn’t go as well, though, as our shooter slowly wore out,” head coach Doug Bertain wrote in an email to The Paly Voice. “We were great at driving and bridge balancing and ended up placing fairly well.”

The objective of the competition was to get each team’s robot to score as many points as possible.  To score points, the robot could either shoot basketballs through a standard-sized hoop or balance itself on a bridge in the arena.

In each round, three robots from three high school teams joined up in alliances and faced off against three other robots, also in an alliance.  For the first 15 seconds of the round, the robots were in autonomous mode, before the driving team of four students took over for the remainder of the round.

While in the arena, each robot must collect balls from the ground in the arena and shoot them into one of four hoops on either side of the arena.  The other way to score points is to balance the robots on a teeter-totter like bridge at the end of the round.  To get the most points, each alliance attempts to balance all three robots on the small bridge.

In the animation portion of the championship, the Paly team placed in the top 50, while Gunn High School’s team finished first overall out of 3,000 teams, according to Bertain.

“The theme for the animation was a sophisticated alien race giving educational help to our planet,” Bertain said.