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Upper Creek Robotics students showcase world‑championship robot, credit district support
Summary
Upper Creek Robotics, sponsored primarily by St. Vrain Valley School District RE-1J, presented its FIRST/FTC robot and described a novel auto‑clipping strategy and vision system that helped the team win state and world championships.
Members of Upper Creek Robotics presented their competition robot and recounted winning the FIRST World Championship during the May 27, 2025, St. Vrain Valley School District RE-1J Board of Education meeting.
Teresa Ewing, a computer‑science teacher and mentor, told the board the team began as an after‑school club in 2005 and now supports multiple teams across the region. "Technically, we are outside of the school district, but St. Vrain is our largest sponsor," Ewing said. She described a large high‑school team of roughly 70 students and 25 adult mentors who are primarily engineers or retirees with tech experience.
Three student presenters described the robot and its strategy. Malcolm Smith, team captain, explained the match format and the team’s approach: instead of traditional human‑assisted scoring, the robot stores and assembles nine clip hooks and then automatically attaches them to field elements to create scoring "specimens," enabling faster scoring in the double‑points autonomous period. "The name of the game is speed," Smith said.
Julian Hansen, the mechanical lead, described the compact mechanical design and noted the team repurposed a telescoping car radio antenna mechanism as a linear extension to reach game elements while maintaining a small robot footprint. Trevor White, the software lead, described the vision challenges across varying venue lighting and credited mentorship from an alumnus at Carnegie Mellon University to help the team build a fast vision pipeline. "We were one of, if not the only team in the world to run our vision algorithm on the whole field," White said.
The students recounted competing at two Colorado regionals, winning the state championship, qualifying for worlds and serving as alliance captain at the FIRST World Championship in Houston, where the alliance went undefeated in the semifinals and finals. The team showed a video of the robot scoring 10 specimens during the first 30 seconds (autonomous), an advance the students said gave them a competitive edge.
Ewing thanked the board and the district for financial and moral support and noted that many students are going on to engineering and technology programs at colleges including CU Boulder, the University of Washington, Stanford, the University of Maryland, UT Austin and the Colorado School of Mines. Board members and audience members praised the students and invited them to bring the robot to future events.
No board action was associated with the presentation; it was part of the meeting's recognition and audience participation segment.
