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MCC Daily Tribune Archive

Upward Bound Senior Participates in FIRST Robotics Competition


Abdu Ebrahim, a senior in MCC’s Upward Bound program, participated in the FIRST Robotics Competition semi-finals April 27th-April 30th. A member of Wilson C. Magnet High School’s X-Cats team, Abdu was part of the group in charge of programming the robot’s software. “Software is very difficult,” Abdu says, “because you’re using Java, Java-speech. You order the robot to go up this much distance, then this distance. If something touches it, or something in the floor changes direction, it will miss.”

After placing 4th out of 44 teams in the Finger Lakes Regionals, Abdu and the Wilson C. Magnet team were able to compete in the semi-finals in St. Louis, Missouri. X-Cats teams have only seven weeks to build a robot capable of engaging in the competition. The rules of the game change from year to year, forcing the builders to adapt to the challenge at hand. The nearly 40-man teams consist of mechanics, electronic engineers, and software engineers. “Mechanics build it first, then they pass it to electronic engineers,” Abdu explains. “Then they pass it to us. We’re software engineers. We put the programs on the robot. We fill the robot.”

Even though Abdu and the X-Cats team didn’t win, he says it was an extremely positive experience all the same. “It’s not to win and to be a champ,” Abdu says. “We just build the robot. That’s the fun part.” The X-Cats motto, according to Abdu, is: “We build people, not only robots. That’s what we stand for.”

Spencer Sisson
Upward Bound
05/24/2011