The history of our team starts in the year 2001. Our advisor Mr. Vogel and Mentor Matt Cholerton were a part of team 311. Sayville also had a team for that one year, Team 646 the Mechanical Animals. Led by Mr. Carbocci and Mr. McLoughlin they were able to make the finals of the SBPLI Long Island Regional. Sadly they lost in the finals and came in second. The next year the Mechanical Animals were disbanded while Mr. Vogel graduated from High School and two years after Matt graduated from high school. Eventually Mr. Vogel got a job with Sayville public schools and Matt got a job working with Northrop Grumman.
In 2008 Mr. Vogel announced that there would be a robotics team forming. This garnered the attention of many people who were interested in a tech elective. At the first meeting Mr. Vogel told us that Mr. Carbocci would not be able to be an advisor for us like originally planned. Instead a middle school tech. teacher named Mr. Kruise volunteered time from his day in order to help us out. After we sorted out introductions we had some tough decisions to make. The first choice was whether we wanted to continue with the old team or start a new team and be classified as rookies. We choose to be rookies and received a new number. With that decision we were given the perk of having a mentor team. Our mentor team was team 329 Patchogue Medford who helped us out throughout the build season. We then had to choose our name which was an annoying task. We threw many ideas around and ended with two. We would either become the Spartans or reuse our old name of the Mechanical Animals. It was a close vote and in the end a team was formed, Team 2487 The Mechanical Animals. We had many meetings to learn how to use the equipment and pick up some basic skills. Then the build season started and we received our first robotics challenge, FIRST Overdrive. The first week of the build season was mostly brainstorming ideas and designs. We did not put that much work into the robot initially but that soon changed. Matt Charleton came down to help us work and then his father came down to help, Pat-Med also helped us out a lot and with our advisors we were able to make a structurally sound robot. We took everything down to the wire in the end just barely finishing electronics and pneumatics we had a program that barely worked but were able to ship out a working robot to the SBPLI Long Island Regional. After we shipped the robot we worked on mostly graphical things like team shirts and buttons for the competition.
Our First day at the competition we were a little nervous and overwhelmed but we still had work to do. Most of us were putting finishing touches on the robot while the programming team encountered some problems. The program got messed up and needed to be redone. This problem was fixed when we realized our pit was right across from Hauppauge. One of the mentors for Hauppauge is a man by the name of Mark McCloud who is known as a programming guru. He helped the programming team get the basic code to run the robot and then he helped them understand the intricacies of an autonomous program. We competed in some practice matches trying to improve our autonomous program after each match. By the end of the first day our autonomous program improved to one of the better ones at the competition. The second day started out a little slow but we ended with a positive record putting us into a good position for later on. The second day started with the remaining qualifying matches and we won them all leaving us in ninth place overall. Due to teams in the top eight picking out of the top eight we were bumped up to the sixth picking position. We first selected team 2010 from Ohio and then we selected team 102 from New Jersey. We went undefeated through the quarter and semi finals which brought us to the finals. We went out and won the first match but then lost the second. It was all down to one match we went out played the match and after a dramatic pause the judges announced the winner. We won the regional and were given one free shipment to Atlanta Georgia and the opportunity to go to nationals. It was an easy decision for the team, we were going to nationals. Before the end of the regional we also earned three other awards the rookie inspiration award, the highest rookie seed award and the best website award.
The split decision to go to Atlanta was an amazing decision but it did not leave us that much time to plan. We needed transportation, food and a place to stay. It was difficult but we managed to make all of the arrangements. We flew down to Atlanta and got settled in to our hotel. We went to the Georgia dome where the scouts went to the stands and the rest of the team went to the pits to work on the robot. We were placed into the Galileo division at nationals and did well on the first day only losing our first match and by the end we were in fourth place in our division. The second day came around and we lost our two remaining matches dropping us down to the forties and were overlooked when teams were picking for the elimination rounds. We lost but we did our best and proved that we are a force even though we were only rookies.
- Mike Finger