Coupeville Sports

Ready to win the day. (Photos courtesy Alison Perera)

They’re powered up.

After competing in tandem with Oak Harbor for a while, Coupeville High School has launched its own robotics team once again.

The squad is officially FTC Team 32666, but they’re better known as the “32-Bit Devils” and they’re ready to shake up the robotics world.

School Board Director Alison Perera and physics/math teacher Logan Inces are the advisors, with 11 middle and high school students on the roster.

That group includes juniors Lina Shelly, Haylee Armstrong, and Lindy Sylvester, as well as sophomores Ryan Beaston and Noah Stribrny, and freshman Frank Morrell.

Eighth graders Ross Allred, Farrin Workman, Ash Prats, Hayli Marley, and Jade Peabody complete the team.

The 32-Bit Devils have competed in two league events in the FIRST Tech Challenge so far and currently sit sixth out of 12 teams.

Coupeville will step into the big time Dec. 7, when it attends a 26-team tourney off-Island featuring numerous squads from Seattle and Edmonds.

The FIRST Tech Challenge is “a robotics competition where teams of students design, build, and program small robots to score points in a series of fast-paced matches.”

Each match is played on a small court with two alliances (red and blue), and the alliances switch up with every match, meaning your partner in one round can be your rival later in the tourney.

This year’s game requires building a robot which shoots a wiffle ball into a standing goal.

L to r, it’s Alison Perera, Lindy Sylvester, Lina Shelly, Haylee Armstrong, Frank Morrell, Hayli Marley, Jade Peabody, Ross Allred, Farrin Workman, and Logan Ince.