Team Inconceivable, a Peterborough-based FIRST Tech Challenge team, is headed for the FIRST Tech Challenge state robotics competition at NHTI in Concord on Saturday with their 30-pound robot “Inconceivable.”

“We love making robots,” said team member Malcolm Holt.

“And we love being together,” said teammate George Parker. 

The state competition is a qualifying round for teams competing for the FIRST Tech Challenge global competition April 17 to 20 in Houston. Team Inconceivable consists of Malcolm Holt, Elanor Kane, Amelia Mair, Rowan Mair, Deryk Ouellette, Tyler Ouellette, George Parker, Eleanor Parker, Christian Witham, Isaac Witham and Jason Wyatt. Coach Brighid Wood is assisted by Sarah Mair, Chris Ouellette and Bob Holt. Students hail from across the Monadnock region and attend public, private and home school.

The team has met at MAXT Makerspace in Peterborough for several years, taking advantage of the vast workshop space at the facility. 

“Considering who these kids are competing with, their success really needs to be noted. Our team is also a little younger than many of the other teams, which are mostly high school kids. We have a lot of seventh- and eighth-graders, but we have done well in competition,”  said Wood.

Sarah Mair of Antrim, mother of two children on the team, agreed.

“We are up against teams like Phillips Exeter and Derryfield, where the kids are actually taking robotics as a class in school and have funding and a lot of support, and they’re high school kids. Our team is almost all middle-schoolers, and they have done well,” she said. 

FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science Technology) is a global nonprofit organization founded by New Hampshire inventor Dean Kamen dedicated to advancing STEM education for youth through robotics. The FIRST Tech Challenge is the middle- to high-school age group of the FIRST robotics program, which ranges from the elementary school FIRST Lego Challenge through the high school FIRST Robotics Competition. 

Each year, FIRST  teams are presented with a different robot design challenge, which includes specific tasks for the robots to complete in the prescribed competition space. This year, robots will compete in a 12- by 12-foot square enclosure with one-foot-high walls to stack and move plastic shapes called “pixels” as part of a competitive game. 

“This has been a great learning experience. I’m excited for the competition,” said Deryk Oullette of Lyndeborough. Ouellette’s brother Tyler joined the team in August. 

Over 400 students from 43 New Hampshire FIRST Tech Challenge teams will compete on Saturday. While the teams compete against one another to earn points in the challenge, FIRST also awards championships to teams who demonstrate sportsmanship and cooperation, and winning these championships can also qualify teams for the global round of competition. 

Part of the competition is “scouting” the other teams, with two students from each team assigned to watch other teams to learn about the projects.

“The competitions are a big deal,” said Sarah Mair. “I was so impressed with how FIRST Challenge developed camaraderie between the teams. They’re separate teams competing against one another, but they also work together with alliances, and they’re always looking to help one another out. We had a damaged piece at one competition, and another team stepped right up to offer us a replacement piece.” 

Sixth-grader Amelia Mair explained the team’s strategy for breaking the ice with other teams. 

“When we’re scouting, we always offer people fruit snacks, and they always love them and it makes people less shy, and we get more information that way. It encourages the gregarious professionalism,” said Amelia, citing one of the FIRST Tech Challenge’s team goals.  “It was Isaac’s idea to have snacks.”

The members of Team Inconceivable were eager to point out some of the more-challenging aspects of the their robot, including the all-direction wheels and the paper airplane launcher.

George Parker of Greenfield said it was really hard “not to touch the robot” when things malfunctioned. 

“When we are competing, we can’t touch the robot. We have to use the controller and control the robot from outside the field,” George explained. “The autonomous driving was a big challenge.”

“We had so many different ideas to solve the problems,” said Rowan Mair of Antrim.

At Monday night’s practice, the team demonstrated the robot’s ability to perform some of the tasks which will be required in the competition. Using the controller, the team ran a demonstration of the robot completing its tasks: selecting a plastic “pixel,” crossing the game field to the correct location and dropping the pixel into the right slot on a game board by reading a QR code on the board. 

Isaac Witham noted how heavy the robot is.

“It has to have a little wheelie cart,” he said. 

The team also displayed their rubber duck launcher, which they designed and built over the summer before the competition season began. 

“It shoots the ducks out at very rapid speed. We had so many ducks,” Isaac said.

Rowan Mair explained the design process.

“We used CAD (computer assisted design) to design the the duck launcher. We realized we had to have kind of a dent in the top to load the ducks in, and there were some other spots where it had to be open,” she said.

For information about Team Inconceivable, send email to Brighid Wood at brighid@stonemarche.org,  or call 603-371-9047, Ext. 311. Find Team Inconceivable on Instagram @team_20099. For information about all FIRST robotics programs, please visit firstinspires.org.