After battling hard through a tumultuous 2015-2016 season, the Bethpage Eagles Robotics Team looks to do some serious robotic damage during this season.

If you don’t know what robotics does, well…they build and program an entirely new robot each year and take it with them to their competitions.

The team’s previous nerf-ball-shooting robot was very successful (for more information, check out our previous article on the team). For this season, robotics marketing manager Smiti Shah claimed the team is working towards building a robot that “will be able to shoots hundreds of smaller balls into a high goal, deliver ‘rings’ to a human in the middle of a field, and should be able to climb a rope.” Ambitious, indeed.

Before competing, the team needs to make sure they have enough time to practice with the robot. Overall, they have six weeks to finish building and practicing, as well as coming up with different strategies for the competition.

Senior robotics captain Sam Perkowski said, “you do not need to know how to build and program in order to be in robotics, especially since most people around aren’t experienced with that either.”

Smiti followed this up with “It’s an inviting place for people from all different walks of life, whether you know about robots or not.”

Anyone interested in participating can go to the Robotics Lab, which is located on the right side of the hallway across from the stage doors in the hallway leading to the library. If that sounds complicated, maybe you shouldn’t be involved.