It’s a national first place for Friendswood High School and this time it involves zero-robotics.
       The Friendswood High School Zero-Robotics team (Team Ganymede) is the first place team in the nation. Members will be heading to MIT in mid-December to run their code on the SPHERES satellites that are on board the International Space Station.
       Team members are Noah Kessler, Winston Wu, Kyle Wiley, Dan Rutledge, Quinn Swanson, Joe Le, Bobby Brown, Ryan Ham, Joe Rogers, Dustin House and Garrison Neel.           
       The win is all part of a competition sponsored by MIT and NASA.
       The Zero-Robotics competition was divided into two phases with an algorithmic mathematical formula that weighed both challenges and added them together.
       The first one was an on-line simulation where each team competed against all other contestants in a round-robin tournament with 231 simulation runs.
       Team Ganymede was able to defeat ALL teams during this challenge making them rank first place after the first challenge, according to FHS sponsor Annette Walter.
       The second challenge was held from 3 to 5 pm in a live webcast that team members were able to watch the results of each competition (it was a double elimination bracket).
       The students submitted their final code for testing at MIT's ground facilities, where the satellites (which are identical to the ones on the ISS) operated in 2D mode. 
       “Once again, we were undefeated and came up #1 in the second challenge which makes us #1 in the nation!” Walter said.
       “We were able to use Skype to communicate with the MIT Zero-Robotics team all through the competition. This challenge was an EXCELLENT example of Project Based Learning which is what Computer Science is all about.”
            Helping the FHS team are NASA Computer Science mentors Dr. David Goeken and Dr. Steve Swanson.
       “We are heading into the finals as FIRST in the nation.  Nine other teams are competing with us -- we had defeated them all before -- but we all have an opportunity to change our code and our strategies between now and when we compete on the Space Station -- anything can happen then...I'm hoping that my guys will continue to excel and come up with unbeatable strategies,” Walter said.
            The nine competitors include high school teams in Magna, Utah; Lexington, Massachusetts; Northbrook, Illinois; Manassas, Virginia; Upper St. Clair, Pennsylvania; Stuyvesant, New York; Charlottesville, Virginia; Falmouth, Virginia; and Naples, Florida.
       The teams will be competing on the Space Station on December 16, contingent the Shuttle goes off on November 30 as planned. The astronauts are trained to help the young teams program the satellites.