Inside Redmond Proficiency Academy’s space in the old Printing Post building, students plan a three-minute sequence that dominates their year.

They build a robot and teach it tasks such as collecting wiffle balls and shooting them into a basket, following lights on a beacon and picking up a large exercise ball and placing it in a basket.

It’s all part of their training for FIRST Tech Challenge, a national robotics competition. RPA’s team No. 5627, also known as the Robotics Quasar Alliance, is off to a solid start, finishing second at the recent Super Qualifying Tournament in Hillsboro.

“We’ve never placed so high,” RPA robotics teacher Josh White said.

The team, which has been around since 2010, will advance for the second time to the state competition, to be held Saturday and Sunday at Benson Polytechnic High School in Portland. White said RPA is the only Central Oregon team to make it.

Their qualifying performance placed them behind only Hot Wired Robotics, a Portland-based team that won the world championship in 2014 and is three-time defending West Super Regional champions.

Robotics Quasar Alliance (no one is sure where the name originates from) is one of two robotics teams at RPA, a public charter school. They actually finished behind the other RPA team in their 10-team area league, before beating them out at the Super Qualifying Tournament

All FIRST Tech teams are given the same challenge at the start of the year, this year being the wiffle ball/beacon/exercise ball. They design the robot using two Android phones, one that is connected to a video game controller the students use to send messages to the other phone, which is on the robot.

Except they can’t use the controller during the first 30 seconds of the competition, known as the autonomous period. As the name suggests, they have to program the robot using Java code to do the required tasks on its own during that time.

The key is developing the robot to run the program consistently, students say.

“If one of the wheels slips for just a second and doesn’t grip the floor, it can throw off the entire autonomous period,” said senior Alex Guyer.

The students work on the project as part of a fall term class, and continue into the winter. White said many spend hours outside class in the robotics room.

“It’s a pretty loose team. They show up when they have time to work on it,” he said. “They continue working on it until they get hungry and it’s time to go home.”

Not so loose are the instructions the students have to follow from two manuals with more than 100 pages each.

The students are continually adapting the robot. They took it apart after the last competition to make it better collect the wiffle balls it fires.

“We’re going to need a lot of dedication to get a working robot out there,” said eighth grader Logan Bryan, the only middle schooler on the team that is open to grades 7 to 12.

The purpose of the class is the give the students experience in real world engineering challenges, White said.

“It doesn’t get much more real world than this,” he said.

The different teams are on good terms and even help each other out, lending each other parts or controllers.

“We here in Central Oregon are pretty isolated compared to the teams in the Valley,” White said. “When we go to the Valley, we learn a lot from them.”

The teams from the west side of the state typically have the advantages of more sponsorships and mentoring from companies like Intel, Google and Boeing, which have a presence in their area, said senior Deon Lofton.

“Most of these parts are very old, and our parts are very limited,” he said. “We don’t have a lot of sponsors, but we’re still doing what we can to make it up so high.”

Should RPA place highly at the state competition, it would advance to the Super Regional in Tacoma.

The January opening of RPA’s robotics room has helped make the program more viable, White said. They now have a dedicated space where they don’t have to set up and take apart the robot’s large testing area each day.

“It makes it a flexible space where they can work when they have time,” he said. “That is what RPA is about, they can come in and take things as far as they want to go.”

They plan to show off the robotics room with performances as part of Experience RPA night, which runs from 5:30-7:30 p.m. March 7. Visit rpacademy.org for more information.

“It’s a good marketing tool,” White said.

— Reporter: 541-548-2186, gfolsom@redmondspokesman