Students at Cardinal Wuerl North Catholic High School have spent the last semester designing, constructing and coding a robot to compete with schools across the nation.

The school robotics club, The Trojanators, is in its fourth year and offers students the opportunity to work in robotics and develop skills in business and engineering.

The students will compete in the annual competition staged by FIRST, (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), an organization dedicated to inspiring young people to be technology leaders and innovators.

“It's this giant STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) competition where teams have six weeks to build a robot,” said Matt Esser, founder and mechanical lead of the club. “And they come from all over the world. Last year we competed against teams from China and Canada, and this year we're competing with teams from China and Taiwan and all across the United States.”

These six weeks of build time are intense, with team members spending hundreds of hours in the machine shop, working to build a winning machine.

“We have a team of about 30 students, and we meet here almost every day from the beginning of January to about the end of February, trying to construct a robot,” said Esser, “and we do this using CAD (computer-aided design) design and software development.”