Recently, the Viperbots program won second overall at the UIL Robotics competition, coming just behind Westlake. This is the second year the competition has been held and Vandegrift has competed both years.

“Normally at all our other competitions we’ve got homeschooled teams, community teams, middle school teams, so it’s a very different kind of competition in terms of the people you see and it’s only their second year,” senior Linnea May said.

Vandegrift took three teams to UIL this year- 7161, 6299, and 6209. Last year, two of these teams, Venom and Quad X, took first and second place respectively at state. May said she has high hopes for Quad X in future years.

“I want Quad X to maintain our monopoly that we seem to have on the design award,” May said. “Every year when we go to worlds, we find a way, like what can we do to design our robot to win it again, and I just want my team to think about how we can improve, improve, improve and hopefully win design again.”

The UIL competition marks the end of the Robotics season and May said that UIL was a good way to finish the year.

“Normally there’s the stress of the season, like am I going to advance, am I going to win an award so I have to keep an eye out for judges,” May said. “We’re definitely taking it seriously but it’s a nice end to the season where let’s just go do what we can. We’ve been working so hard this year. Let’s just see what we can do.”