The Mount Vernon Robotics team 85B, consisting of Nate Poduska and Matthew Bradbury, took home a state title on Saturday, Feb. 28. 2026.  The team won and was in shock. ¨Winning the state was unbelievable; it took a while to actually sink in and for us to realize what had actually happened,¨ Bradbury, a junior, said. The team had faced strong competition and had a hard day, but came up victorious. 

Usually, when talking about sports competitions, people like using a strategy, which is the same as in robotics. Bradbury said that his strategy is to ¨score as many points in the autonomous period and then play very heavy defence for the rest of the match.¨ The autonomous period is at the start of each match, where robots score points by acting on their own based on the code that the students program them with. 

On the other hand, Poduska said that just practicing and making sure to frequently test robots is a good enough strategy. 

Robotics is a very important part of people’s lives. Matthew Bradbury said that he enjoys the patience that it makes you build. The robots that you build need 100% focus and patience because of the intense software. 

When asked what one word describes robotics, Porter Chatman said “challenging” because of having to build all of the robots from scratch.

Poduska said “Efficiency.” You need to work efficiently while you create things that take months.

Building the robots takes hundreds of hours and intense all-nighters, but the robotics team at Mount Vernon gets the job done.  With working long nights on a robot, you may get a few hours of sleep the night before. This leaves some unprepared, forgetting the simple things like their nutritious breakfast to help them stay energized or their special replacement part for when something breaks. 

Every year, the team builds a new robot for competition; there’s always one element that stays the same while the physical design of each robot changes. This is called an odometry. Bradbury said that odometry is a complex concept with the robot, with parts of it being the system to measure how far the robot travels. The robot is able to calculate the movement every 30 milliseconds.