On December 13th, 2025, Renton High School’s own robotics club, “The Octonauts,” entered their third and final competition of this year’s robotics season “Decode” at North Taps Middle School in Bonnie Lake. They worked on their robot, “GUP,” and practiced before each one of their matches to prepare for the competition ahead.
During this competition, a newly recruited member to the robotics club team came despite being unfamiliar with robotics at the time. Renton High School freshman, Emma Ganaden, thought it was incredibly enjoyable, and so she decided to participate in the competition being one of the Robotics Drivers, who controls the robot during the game. Before the competition started, Emma proposed the idea of making a choreographed introduction when meeting the judges of the robotics competition.
The way you play the game at the Robotics competition is very similar to how you may play basketball, but instead of shooting a ball into a hoop, you have a robot to pick up a ball and launch it inside a scoring zone. It sounds a lot easier than it actually is, and the actual game itself is hardly even the hardest part of the North Taps Middle Schools robotics competition this year. Many aspects of it were incredibly difficult for the Octonauts team to deal with. Such as the incredibly early pickup time that was required in order to get to the school, with our members having to arrive at Renton High School at 6 in the morning. You can hear about the difficult challenges the members of the club had to go through from the two main robotics drivers of the Octonauts team, Emma Ganaden and River Sieradski, who were interviewed. They said the following, “I felt really excited to get there. The competition was however really stressful and fun,” and “It was very fun but very long. I was really hungry the whole time, but I wasn’t sure if I was hungry because I hadn’t eaten or if I was hungry because I was stressed out.”
So, overall, the team members were very excited to participate but did think it took too long and that it was difficult having to wake up so early in the morning.
