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A dedicated group of Hollister High students spent their Presidents’ Week, while school was out, building a robot. Every day for nearly 12 hours, members of Deep Space Robotics Team 6884 were on campus, taking breaks to share meals and getting right back to work.
They were preparing for the first-ever Pinnacles Regional Robotics Competition hosted at Hollister High. The event is expected to draw 1,200 students, coaches, and mentors from 36 teams in California, Nevada, and the Netherlands to showcase cutting-edge robotics innovation.
Sprawled out in their facility—a classroom in the Science and Robotics building—club members are creating marketing materials, coordinating schedules, and physically assembling components of a robot.
“Everything you see is made by a student,” said Vice Captain Adan Amezcua. “So everything you see and all the testing, prototyping, everything is student made.”
In one corner, Jenny Martinez, one of four female students in leadership roles, leads the Fabrication Team. They act as the organization’s mechanical engineers, building an elevator mechanism that will allow part of the robot to extend about five feet into the air.
With more than 40 members and 10 sub-teams, Deep Space Robotics Team 6884 covers all its bases as a self-sustaining, student-run organization. Its HR team even creates team-bonding activities for the students to boost morale.
“You have so much fun when you’re here,” said Marketing Lead Aarya Morar. “We spend so much time with these people, it’s like a second family.”
Presidents’ Week was crunch time but the students have been working on this particular robot since FIRST Robotics—a global community whose motto is “For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology—announced the game in January, marking the start of “on season.” Students put in about 20 hours a week in the on season.
The game is the same; the robots aren’t.
FIRST Robotics announced the game, with its various ways of scoring points, in January. For the competition, the entire playing field will be decorated to reinforce an “ocean” theme, and each challenge reinforces that theme. Hollister chose to focus on the “coral” challenge—to score points, the robot must catch an object, move it to a board, and mount the “coral” to the board. The higher it goes, the more points.
At the end of the game, there’s an additional challenge where robots hang from cages suspended in the air. Amezcua describes the task: “At the end of the game, if your robot can hang from the cage without touching the ground, you get six or 12 points, depending on how ‘deep’ you go.”
Endless challenges
When it comes to engineering, “Nothing’s ever fully done, ” Amezcua said, “‘cause something can always happen. But that’s part of the experience.”
The team will go straight back to the drawing board after this weekend, adapting and changing the robot to prepare for the next competition in five weeks. That’s when they’ll travel to Fresno to compete in the Central Valley Regional April 3-6.
According to Amezcua, it’s not about winning. “We do it just to help out our community more. Because the more kids interested in STEM, the more people come into our club and are learning new things every day.”
The Pinnacles Regional Robotics Competition takes place this weekend, March 1-2, 2025, from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. at Hollister High School’s Mattson Gym. Follow this link for more information.
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