The Davis high school robotics team has had a lot to cheer about these past few years.

Lately, in fact, Citrus Circuits seems to win — or at the very least place second in — just about every competition it enters, including last year’s World Championships in St. Louis, where the team came within a match of winning it all.

But competing in FIRST Robotics has always been about more than winning — it’s really all about spreading the love of science, engineering and math to other young people.

That’s why Segway inventor Dean Kamen started FIRST back in 1989 — to inspire high school students to pursue careers in science and technology. Since then, hundreds of thousands of teens around the world have participated in what’s now dubbed “the varsity sport of the mind,” building and competing with robots of their own design in versions of soccer, basketball, Frisbee and other games.

Ten years ago, with encouragement from a FIRST team based at Vanden High School in Fairfield, Davis teacher Steve Harvey started a local team, composed of students in grades 9-12 from Davis high schools and junior highs.

Within a few years, the team had grown from about a dozen students who struggled to make it out of the quarterfinals of regional competitions to a team of about 60 this year dominating competition after competition.

Last month, the team took first place at a regional event in Elk Grove and also nabbed trophies for most innovative robot design and for winning a match dubbed “Chicks in Charge” — featuring an all-female drive team.

But their loudest cheers during the event probably were not for their own teammates, but for another team entirely: Digital Minds, composed of a dozen students from Pioneer and Woodland high schools.

Citrus Circuits members call the team their “rookie team,” and with good reason.

A few months ago, Citrus Circuits members approached Deborah Bruns at the Yolo County Office of Education about setting up a new FIRST team in Yolo County. Bruns put them in touch with people at Pioneer and Woodland high schools, a presentation was held for dozens of students from the two schools, and just like that, Digital Minds was born.

But Citrus Circuits didn’t just provide the impetus for the new team. They provided a robot — one of their old competition robots — which they helped the Woodland students convert for this year’s competitions; the tools needed, as well as instruction on how to use them; funds for competition registration fees; and even some of their own members to serve as coaches.

The result: In their very first competition — barely weeks after coming together as a team — Digital Minds performed brilliantly at the Elk Grove competition, making it all the way through the qualifying matches and quarterfinals and into the semifinals, before they eventually were eliminated in their third match out of three.

“They did so well,” said Citrus Circuits member Shreya Sudarshana. “It was like a victory for both teams.”

And the Woodland students were thrilled.

“We didn’t expect to do that well,” said Digital Minds captain Christine Pamplona, a sophomore at Pioneer High. “We were very nervous at first, but once we were able to win some matches, we felt better.”

The off-season competition features the same game Citrus Circuits played at the World Championships in April — Aerial Assist, which involves robots throwing large exercise balls through hoops as well as earning points by throwing balls over a truss and catching balls thrown by alliance members. The robots are operated remotely by students.

The Davis students credited Digital Minds’ outstanding performance to excellent robot driving by Gerardo Diaz and Mariah Raymundo as well as great communication and morale within the team.

“They were cheering louder than we were and we have three times as many kids,” said Citrus Circuits co-captain Elise Wong. “I was so excited for them.”

The Woodland team is being mentored by Yesenia Ramirez and Monica Moncada, who operate after-school programs at both Woodland and Pioneer high schools through the Center for Families. The team is coached by Davis students and mentors, Pamplona said.

“They’ve been really supportive,” she said of the Citrus Circuits kids.

Now, Pamplona said, team members are focused on fixing up their robot — it had a malfunction during the September competition that they need to fix — and finding sponsors and raising funds before the next competition in November.

At that competition in Madera, they’ll once again be competing side-by-side with Citrus Circuits, and Citrus Circuits will cover the Digital Minds entry fee, handle the logistics of getting their robot there and provide assistance and guidance every step of the way.

But the ultimate goal is to get Digital Minds self-supporting. To that end, Citrus Circuits has not only given the Digital Minds team thousands of dollars worth of tools — and taught them how to use them — but also is helping the team find sponsors.

Citrus Circuits has benefited from sponsorships by UC Davis, Schilling Robotics and other Davis businesses, and they hope to see some Woodland-based businesses come through for Digital Minds. Sponsors will be necessary if Digital Minds is to enter the 2015 FIRST Robotics challenge.

That competition gets underway in January when teams around the world find out what the 2015 game will be and receive standard component sets to begin building their new robots. Teams have six weeks to complete their build, and then began competing for a chance to return to St. Louis.

It’s a hectic six weeks, with many late nights and long weekends spent in the shop, but the Woodland students will have their Davis counterparts to help get them through, providing resources and encouragement, not to mention the hard-earned wisdom of the past decade.

“Having a team that has gone through 10 seasons of FIRST, we have this whole wealth of experience … to help smooth out their experience,” said team mentor — and former member — Mike Corsetto.

Citrus Circuits also has the werewithal, thanks to the team’s recent move from the Da Vinci Charter Academy campus to Davis High, where with more room — including a brand-new machine shop — both teams have plenty of space to work in.

They likely will need that space in the future, as the popularity of robotics appears to be skyrocketing among Davis youths.

Last year, Citrus Circuits members mentored a single team of elementary-school age children in a FIRST LEGO League. Hoping to expand the program locally, Citrus Circuits held an information night for families last spring. The result? Eight FIRST LEGO League teams in Davis this year, operating out of multiple elementary school sites.

Each team has two parent coaches and all the mentoring, coaching and support they need from Citrus Circuits.

“The goal is to eventually have 20 teams,” Corsetto said.

Why?

Because all those kids will bring that passion for and experience with robotics to high school, where Citrus Circuits will be waiting to welcome them with open arms. And the bigger Citrus Circuits gets, the more outreach the team can do — including creating more high school teams like Digital Minds.

“It’s all about trying to raise the level of involvement and competition in the whole region,” Corsetto said. “We want to continue to spread out, impact more people.”

Team members are quick to thank administrators like Davis High Principal Will Brown and district Superintendent Winfred Roberson for helping Citrus Circuits expand.

Brown, Corsetto said, “is our number one fan on this campus.”

And Roberson, according to team mentor Richard McCann, was instrumental in the team’s growth, which has included not just the move to Davis High and the creation of a machine shop, but also a new robotics class — taught by Harvey — at the high school.

It’s a far cry from the way Citrus Circuits operated for nine years — out of a storage shed on the Da Vinci campus.

“(Roberson) saw the potential two years ago and really kicked off that discussion,” McCann said.

And now it’s not just Davis students feeling grateful, but Woodland students as well.

To assist the Woodland team — which is in need of both mentors and sponsors — contact Ramirez at [email protected] or Moncada at [email protected] or call the Center for Families at 530-406-7221. Learn more about Citrus Circuits at http://www.citruscircuits.org.

— Reach Anne Ternus-Bellamy at [email protected] or 530-747-8051. Follow her on Twitter at @ATernusBellamy

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