Last year they were 14th in the world. Now Braden River students resume quest for robotics dominance.

The buzz and whir of robotics can be heard from technology teacher Gil Burlew’s classroom at Braden River High School most afternoons.

On Wednesday, Lincoln Benedicto manned the controls of a robot zipping around a large table, picking up cubes and stars and tossing them onto the other side of the table.

Benedicto is headed to the Florida State High School VEX Robotics Competition Championship on Friday, where he and his Braden River teammates will compete with 67 other teams from around the state. At stake are 26 spots for the world competition, which will be in Louisville, Kentucky in April.

Of the seven high schools in Manatee County, Braden River is sending two teams to the competition, and Lakewood Ranch is sending one.

Braden River is one of the most successful schools in the country in Technology Student Association competitions. Over the summer, the Braden River team won 26 top-10 prizes and 15 of those were in the top three at the TSA National Conference. Last year, they came in 14th at the world competition in their division.

“I liked the idea of doing something productive and not just sitting around the couch all day,” said Lincoln, who hopes to become an aerospace engineer. “This is the culmination of 100 to 200 hours of work.”

Lincoln’s attitude is shared by his teammates, who, despite the looming competition, are eager to talk about other gadgets they have built.

An animatronic John Glenn is in the early stages. The students are building that one for a TSA competition in two weeks. Glenn’s torso is surrounded by drones, scattered around the room in various stages of construction and repair. Reid Kauffman, a member of the VEX team, crashed his racing drone into a tree while going about 50 mph, so he is in the process of rebuilding several components for it.

But for now, the main focus is the VEX competition.

The robots compete in a 12-by-12 square, scattered with orange cube-shaped bean bags and yellow stars and divided by a metal fence. During the competition, the students will be paired with another team in an alliance and will work together to move as many bean bags and stars over the fence and onto their opponents’ side as they can in 90 seconds.

Although all the students on the team played a hand in building the robot, once the competition begins, Brantley Deines, 15, will be the one operating the controls. His teammate and coach, Jehzel Maldonado, 16, will be by his side, helping him keep his composure during the intense competition. Other students will be spread throughout the fairgrounds, scouting out opponents and deducing strategy.

Last year, the students nearly advanced to the finals in the world competition, which was classified as the largest robotics competition in the world by Guinness Book of World Records. The Braden River team worked with a team from China in the semifinals. The Chinese robot’s axle broke, and the Braden River team still lost by just one point.

“One of the coolest things about the VEX robotics competition is that there’s a little bit here for everybody, and our kids really don’t take a back seat to anybody,” Burlew said.

The gospel of Burlew — “hands on, minds on,” is inadvertently preached by the students in the club.

“A big problem today is kids in high school are doing simpler things, then they get to college, and it’s like, ‘How do I use a wrench,’” Lincoln said. “You can know all the math, you can know we need to launch this star with this amount of force, but if you don’t have the handiwork, math will get you nowhere.”

Burlew is confident about the outcome of the weekend’s competition, and his team shares his optimism. The students have already started a Go Fund Me account for their trip to the world competition in April.

“I’ll tell you what, the competition is tomorrow,” Burlew said. “It’s going to be a go, I’ll tell you that right now.”

This story was originally published February 15, 2017 at 5:51 PM with the headline "Last year they were 14th in the world. Now Braden River students resume quest for robotics dominance.."