The Lytle Techno Pirates dominated at their second league competition on Saturday, winning every match and walking away with a first-place league ranking.
The Junior High Robotics Team kicked off the Harmony Science Academy meet with a bang, winning the first match of the competition with the highest score of the meet, 102 points.
Since their last outing, builder Sarai Calvio added a component to the robot that launched a paper airplane for an additional 30 points. The launcher added bonus points during three of the team's matches. Programmers Elyssa Beazer and Weston Cook have refined the team's autonomous program since the last competition. With the new program running strong, the team took six of the meet's top 10 match scores.
The team had a few setbacks during the meet. At one point, builder Abril Perez had to quickly repair the airplane launcher when it broke down between matches. Driver Isaiah Valdez kept scoring with the robot while avoiding penalties. But Lytle's partnered teams had a few mishaps and were penalized by the judges. During one match, Lytle's alliance partner was given a 50-point penalty. But thanks to another high score by Lytle, they still took the win, 81-89.
After Lytle's last meet in November, they were fourth in the league ranking. By the end of the Saturday meet, however, Lytle had climbed to first place of the 18 schools who competed.