Scenes from the 2026 Robotics Season, which featured three competitive Lincoln Academy teams.
On Friday and Saturday, March 6 and 7, three Lincoln Academy Robotics teams traveled to South Portland to compete in the Maine State VEX Robotics Championship.
This year’s VEX Robotics challenge primarily involves picking up 18-sided blocks that are roughly three inches in diameter and placing them in horizontal tubes to score points. The blocks start scattered on the competition field and in vertical tubes. Team 8030A, made up primarily of seniors, designed and built a robot that was lightweight and nimble. They were excellent at intaking multiple blocks, both from the field and from the vertical loaders, and scoring them quickly into the horizontal tubes.
During the qualification round, Keiran Roopchand, Noah Garnett, Sebastian Morey, Ben Arnold, and Nikola Vucicevic of team 8030A had 6 wins and 2 losses, making them the second-seed team (out of 48 teams) going into the elimination round. They won their round of 16 and quarterfinal matches, but unfortunately, they were eliminated in their semi-final match.
LA Robotics Team 8030B, which is made up of Amelia Starbird, Shayla Pheng, and Riley Kinnane-Petersen, struggled at the tournament. They had 2 wins and 6 losses, but they are grateful they had the opportunity to compete with Maine’s top robotics teams.
Freshmen Norah Rochon, Lilly Lee, and Jake Powell are on Team 8030C. This was their first VEX State Robotics Tournament. They had 4 wins and 4 losses and were ranked 23rd going into the elimination round. Unfortunately, they were eliminated in the round of 16.
Sebastian Morey said a highlight of the State tournament was “watching the robot that we’ve worked so hard on for the last several months performing well and winning matches.”
Lincoln Academy’s robotics team is sponsored by Master’s Machine, which makes it possible for the team to field multiple robots, upgrade their tools, and stock much-needed spare parts. Multiple robotics team members, both current students and alumni, have interned at Masters Machine and applied their coding and engineering skills in a real-world enterprise.
Coach Susan Levesque said, “it is really fun to take multiple teams to tournaments. Each team approaches the challenge in different ways, and they all learn from each other. One of the things I love about the program is that in addition to the hard skills of coding and mechanics, students have to learn the soft skills of team problem solving, communicating with others, recruiting alliance partners, and resolving conflict at every turn. The younger teams have come so far this season, and we are excited to see how far they will go next year. The future of the Electric Eagles is bright!”
