The Benson Robotics program fields two teams in the FIRST Tech Challenge, an international robotics competition.  FTC teams 187 and 267 are the two oldest continuously running teams in the state, having been started in 2006.  This year, team 187 (Phoenix) won a berth at the Oregon State Championship.  This was due to winning the Control Award at the Rose City League championship in January.  The Control Award is for best programming.  The robot is programmed using Android Studio and the Java programming language.

Team 187 competed at the Oregon State Championship on February 26 (judging) and March 3 (six matches).  The robot worked reliably and the team members were very pleased with its performance.  While they did not come out on top as a result of the robot’s performance, they won the second place Design Award, the result of having an excellent engineering notebook, extensive use of 3D CAD modeling, and unique and innovative design concepts.