In only its fourth year competing in the Granite State Regional of the nationwide FIRST Robotics competition, the St. Paul's School robotics team, affectionately known as the Metal Vidsters, placed second with a three-team alliance that included fellow Concordites Bishop Brady High School as well as South Portland (ME) High School.

As an individual team, St. Paul's finished third overall in a field of 48 competing teams, compiling a record of 8-2 over two days of preliminary rounds on February 29 and March 1. Its high team placement allowed the St. Paul's contingent the privilege of selecting two other teams to join their three-team alliance to form one of eight alliance trios in the double-elimination finals on Saturday afternoon.

The SPS-led alliance made it successfully through the quarterfinal and semifinal rounds, spurred on by hundreds of spectators at Manchester's Verizon Wireless Arena. In the championship final, St. Paul's faced two familiar opponents in Pembroke Academy and Manchester's Trinity High School. Pembroke mentored the SPS FIRST squad when the School first entered the engineering competition in 2005.

"The finals were without a doubt the most exciting competitive event I have ever witnessed," said SPS robotics teacher Terry Wardrop '73, acknowledging, "We played well but lost to a stronger alliance."

At an awards ceremony that followed the final round, St. Paul's School won the Judges Award for its community outreach - an effort that included a February 17 mock competition at the Stovell Indoor Tennis Courts open to all area FIRST teams, and recognition of St. Paul's weekly outreach project at Concord's Refurbished Equipment Marketplace, which reinvigorates old wheelchairs and puts them back into circulation.

Now in its 17^th year, the FIRST Robotics Competition is the brainchild of Segway Human Transporter inventor and New Hampshire resident Dean Kamen. FIRST stands for "For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology" and the competition has been designed to foster a love and understanding in youth for the fields of robotics and engineering much in the way that youth athletic programs are designed to teach a love of sports. The competition shows students that the technological fields hold many opportunities and that the basic concepts of science can be applied in varied and exciting ways.

The FIRST Robotics Competition is multinational event that teams professionals and young people to solve an engineering problem in a six-week timeframe using a standard kit of parts and a common set of rules. All teams received their kits full of nuts, bolts, wires, and other parts essential to robot-making on January 5. Teams build robots from the parts and enter them in a series of competitions designed primarily by Kamen. The competition has grown to more than 1,500 teams competing in 41 regional events, and the championship held at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, where more than 7,000 students participate. Overall, FIRST was expected to reach 37,500 high school students in 2008.

About 30 aspiring SPS engineering students worked tirelessly for the last several weeks to create a working robot to participate in a series of field competitions in Manchester. This year's game was called "FIRST Overdrive" and asked students to design robots capable of racing around a track, knocking down 40" inflated Trackballs and carrying them around the playing field. Among the challenges was the ability to program robots that could pass the oversized balls either over or under a 6' 6" overpass.

The St. Paul's robot was tremendously successful at knocking the balls down from the monkey-bar-like overpass, chasing after them, scooping them up, racing around the track, and dumping the balls back over the bars. Wardrop attributed the 2008 robot's success to a student-initiated design that combined two subsystems that worked well in concert; the front-loading winch and the forklift system.

Perhaps it was a harbinger of good things to come, but St. Paul's began the three-day competition on the right foot when the Metal Vidsters' robot passed a rigorous inspection on the initial try Thursday - a first in the four years of SPS participation in the FIRST Robotics event.