Robotics team third in world

SPARTA  The Pope John XXIII Regional High School zero robotics club can say with certainty that it is one of the best clubs in the world.

That’s because the zero robotics club helped its alliance team place third in the world at the Zero Robotics High School Tournament International Space Station (ISS) finals Jan. 28 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.

The ISS Finals featured 14 alliances from around the world and the alliances faced each other in a competition in which they had to command an MIT-created robot on the International Space Station, navigate it to a disabled satellite, hook onto the disabled satellite, and tow it to safety while avoiding space debris in the fastest time possible.

“This was incredible,” Jacky Thorward, a senior, said of the third-place finish. “The competition was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. It’s the best thing that we’ve accomplished in my high school career.”

“It was crazy,” Christopher Biancone, a senior, said. “It was just a great experience for us.”

Along with Thorward and Biancone, the Pope John zero robotics club also includes seniors Zhenyuan (Henry) Gong and Hongyue Jin; juniors Patryk Lewicki, Jonathan Meyers, Rohan Mukundhan, Michael Pacholarz, and Evan Rizzo; freshman Zoe Rizzo. The club worked with a team from Virginia and a team from Italy. Together, they scored nine points to finish six points behind the winners.

However, the Pope John zero robotics club felt it gained a ton of valuable experience because every member was new to the team with the exception of Thorward.

“This was basically a learning experience for us,” Biancone said. “We had to really work hard to understand what exactly to do with the coding in order to program these robots to go and hook onto the satellite.”

Joe Giovannone, the club’s first-year faculty adviser, was impressed with his students’ performance. “I really enjoyed seeing them work together to overcome difficult challenges all throughout the year,” Giovannone said. “It was great to see all of their hard work pay off in the finals. The whole competition is a wonderful chance for students to take what they have learned in their classes and apply it to a real life problem.”