Built in a borrowed garage with borrowed tools, a Santa Monica teen robotics team has earned a spot on the world stage.
SaMoTech, a community-based team of students from Santa Monica High School, won the Southern California Regional Championship in the FIRST Tech Challenge last weekend, going undefeated across nine matches to claim the title over more than 200 competing teams from Los Angeles and across Southern California.
The victory sends SaMoTech to the FTC World Championship in Houston, April 29 through May 2, where it will face the top teams from more than 8,000 squads representing 81 countries, including powerhouse programs from Romania, China and Italy.
"When we first started in the garage, I just saw it as an opportunity to continue to do robotics like we had in middle school," said Alexa Kagiwada, one of six founding seniors on the team. "Our team would consistently rank in the top teams in SoCal, California, and even the world. Halfway through our first season, it definitely felt possible."
For the six founders — all seniors graduating this spring — the regional title caps a four-year journey that began under decidedly humble circumstances. After starting robotics at John Adams Middle School, the students entered Samohi as freshmen and found no district-supported team waiting for them. They built one themselves, operating out of the crowded garage of volunteer coach Chris Rowe, father of two team members.
SaMoTech is now a 10-member varsity squad and a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit, funded primarily by the students' own families, with additional support from matching grants from Yahoo and Boeing and sponsorships from Panasonic and the Santa Monica Rotary Club.
The road to the regional title was not without pressure. In the first qualifying match, SaMoTech's randomly assigned partner suffered a mechanical failure and could not shoot. Rather than panic, the team adapted.
"We've been through this before, we've learned to stay calm," said Brandon Kirbyson, a founding senior and the team's drive-team driver. "Since we knew our robot has the fastest and most accurate shooter, our partner just played amazing defense allowing us to shoot non-stop. We ended up winning by more than 50 points."
SaMoTech went on to set multiple high scores throughout the event, finishing as the only undefeated team in the competition.
For the six founders, the win carries extra weight as their final competitive season. Senior Georgia Rowe reflected on how far the team had come since its earliest days.
"On our middle school team, we were able to get to Regionals once, but we were never one of the top teams," Rowe said. "Our goals were just to make it as far in the competition as possible. Then once we formed our own team, our end goal was simply making it to Worlds. Now that we've achieved that, we have to set entirely new goals, ones that are way higher."
Getting to Houston, however, will not be easy on the budget. The cost of attending the World Championship has climbed to more than $20,000 — more than double a typical full season's expenses — driven by required stays in event-sanctioned hotels, meals for 10 students over six days and the premium pricing that comes with an event drawing tens of thousands of attendees. The team has already secured $7,000 in local corporate sponsorships to offset costs, with additional fundraising underway.
Beyond the competition itself, the founders say they hope their run inspires lasting change in the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, which currently does not support a single FTC team. The middle school program where SaMoTech got its start was discontinued two years ago. Most competing teams in the region are school-based, with paid coaches and, in some cases, academic credit.
"I hope that people in our community see how just six teenagers, fresh out of middle school, can create something they want to see in the community," Kagiwada said. "Hopefully that leads to some sort of robotics that can be funded by the school district so that others can have the same opportunities that we do."
The FIRST Tech Challenge, founded in 1989 by inventor Dean Kamen, challenges students in grades 7 through 12 to design, build, program and operate robots in head-to-head competition in both autonomous and remote-controlled modes.
Three of SaMoTech's founding members are also enrolled in Samohi's Project Lead the Way engineering program, where they recently placed first in the region and third overall in the NASA JPL Invention Challenge.
The World Championship begins April 29 in Houston.
For more information, visit samotechrobotics.com.