Sandburg’s Eagle Army tops off season with top 10 finish

Carl Sandburg High School’s Robotics Team 3488 Eagle Army closed out their regular season ranking 10th out of 31 teams at the Central Illinois Regional. In addition, this is the first year in team history that the team served as an alliance captain in back-to-back years.

While Team 3488’s playoff run was short-lived, losing to higher-ranked alliances and being ousted from the double elimination playoff tournament, they are anxiously awaiting official word that their performance at the regional competition will qualify them for the inaugural Illinois State Robotics Championship in mid-June.

"The students showed resilience throughout the competition and applied the engineering processes we practiced throughout the season to make this year's robot perform its best. We are excited to compete at the inaugural Illinois First Championship. Our performance this season bodes well for the growth of the team in future seasons, and we hope to continue to grow and recruit new future engineers to engage in robotics."

The competition is broken up into qualification and elimination rounds. During the qualification rounds, each team competes in 10 3-robot versus 3-robot matches. Opponents in each match are randomly assigned, and team records at the end of qualification rounds determine rank.

At the start of elimination rounds, the top 8 teams are named alliance captains, meaning they pick the other two robots that will be on their team for the duration of the playoff. Sometimes, alliance captains choose other alliance captains to be a part of their team. An alliance captain is ultimately in charge of choosing their team and takes a leadership role in match strategy throughout the playoffs.

The D230 Foundation played a small part in Eagle Army's success by funding all the necessary components to build a robot transportation cart for the competition season.