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After working hard for six and a half weeks to build a robot, twenty nine schools from around the metro area got to showcase their skills by participating in Week Zero, a mock robotics competition hosted by Eagan to give teams a chance to see how their robots would perform in an actual competition.  “The whole point of it is for teams to test their robots and see how they would actually do,” reported Anusha Sharma, the captain of the robotics team.

The event started with teams receiving a match-by-match analysis, which told them what team they would be up against.  During the event, teams had to successfully complete a series of tasks.

This year, the robots had to complete a game called “Destination Deep Space,” where the robots had to put a hatch panel, which is a circular disk, on a rocket ship.  Then, they needed to shoot balls into a compartment above them before being able to complete the match by stepping on and off of three steps.

“We got to see a lot of the teams and how they performed and what that means for our future competitions,” recounted Reece Holmdahl, a sophomore who is new on the team this year.  Each team goes through about twenty matches before they get done, and the team who won the most matches gets announced at the closing ceremony at the end of the event. Most team members were excited to see how their robots held up against the others.  

“It’s a tradition that our FRC team has been doing for so long,” said Sharma.  “I’m assuming that they’re going to keep holding it every single year.” While not competing, teams could also attend conferences being held as part of the event.  “We had conferences like Women in Stem and conferences on safety,” recalled Sharma.

At the end of the competition, all teams go home with valuable knowledge on how to improve their robot.  “This is a proving ground for how we’re going to do at worlds this year,” noted Holmdahl. “We really got an opportunity to see how our robot stacks up against our competition, so I think it means good things for us.”