Lynbrook Students Excel at Robotics Competition

Lynbrook's athletic teams have received plenty of recognition over the years - but what about Lynbrook's "varsity sport for the mind?"

recently sent its first ever robotics team to the F.I.R.S.T. (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) competition, an international event which pits high school students and their self-made robots against each other in robotics-related games. 

Lynbrook was led by the team’s faculty leader, and team captain Noah Chrein, a junior at Lynbrook HS.

The theme of the contest was "Bowled-Over." Lynbrook's team, named the "LAIMOS" (Lynbrook Artificially Intelligent Mechanical Owls) built the robot and programmed it to complete certain tasks, such as moving a bowling ball up a ramp.

The competition took place on Saturday, March 17 in an eight-by-eight arena at the Jacob Javitz center in NYC. Parent Amy Chrein attended the competition and said she and other parents were thrilled at how well the team performed.

“They did amazing – even the best team there had their share of glitches,” said Chrein. “For the first ever team…they did great."

Noah said that the road to the competition was not easy. He said the team's first design was scrapped about three months in to the building process.

"We had gone through many different designs of our robot, the first of which was designed in such a way, that if perfectly executed, would have propelled us to the top of the ranking boards," Noah said. "However, and rather slowly and painfully, we learned that there is no such thing as perfect execution."

The next design was more realistic than the first; no bells, no whistles, and "certainly no complex infrared LPS triangulation to determine our coordination on the field."

"We basically had only two months to build a robot from scratch, so we all sacrificed our Friday's to meet and build from 3pm to generally around 10pm," Noah said. 

Besides Noah, Lynbrook's team was made up of the following students: Brandon Wong, Zack Proefriedt, Dan Gomm, Ryan Barrison, Austin Meersand, Alex Berman, Adam Estrin, Eric Li, Vivik Shah, Sam Schneller, Cameron Levine, Jake Brunette, Liam Deegan and Joe Cappadona.

Noah said the team finished 31st overall out of 36 teams, although he said the rankings were based on how well you did with another player, not by individual performance. While 31 out of 36 may not sound so great, Noah said the team would have came in 12th place if the score was judged on an individual basis.

But Noah added that the point of the competition was not really to come in first or be the best - it was to learn.

"Most people will look at the robotics competition and say "Well that's stupid, why does anyone need to create a robot to pick up balls and place them in crates?" Noah said. "These people are missing the point entirely -  [the point] is to provide an environment to grow logical skills, the same ones necessary to build a robot to plug up an oil leak cause by some corporation."