michael Schuh/special to the Town Crier From left to right, Austin, Parker and Travis Schuh fine-tune the robot arm and its grabber.

The Los Altos Community Botball Team is preparing to compete in the National Botball competition in Norman, Okla., in July.

Botball is an educational outreach program that aims to engage students in learning practical applications of science, engineering, technology and math through robot building and programming. In the competitions, different teams use their robots to compete in a game of object retrieval.

The Los Altos team competed against 30 teams at the Northern California Regional Botball robotics competition April 22, tying for first place in the Project Documentation portion of the competition, designed to help students learn the value of documenting the engineering process.

The team, which includes middle and high school students from Los Altos, put a lot of effort into documenting their robot design and their teamwork during the eight weeks they had to design, build and program their robots. They also prepared materials for, rehearsed and presented a 10-minute talk on their game strategy, thought process, robot design, team strategy and accomplishments.

“The overall goal of the program is to get children excited about science and technology,” said Michael Schuh, coach of the Los Altos team. “I think this is a great program, and I’d like to see more kids participating in this. My kids just love it.”

The Los Altos Rotary Club is one of the team’s supporters.

For more information on the Los Altos Community Botball Team, call Michael Schuh at 604-1460 or visit www.losaltosrobotics.org.