“Oh lord, I’ve had enough of these people out here.”

It was the winter of 2025, the “Guppies” were in the second-floor robotics practice room. Suddenly, our team captain JP yelled, “Guys, we need to lock in!”, who spent the past two hours scrolling his TikTok videos. Omlet and I were programming the robot and were surprised when hearing him say that. We both turned and were looking at him, Omlet goes, “Umm… who was just on TikTok for the past 2 hours?” Sudden silence in the room. “GULP!” I broke the silence and kept on working on the robot.

Soon, preparation time for the state championship. Everyone is so stressed, the team is falling apart, people blame each other for everything that goes wrong. The room is filled with the smell of argument. Eventually, “I’m done guys, I am not taking the blame for the robot.” said Landon. “Boom” the door slammed, he left the room and we stared at each other, not realizing what just happened.

The team has to move on without Landon, Ethan had to step up as the new builder for the team. He was not as good as Landon, not even close, but good enough to keep the robot safe from breaking apart. Everyone tried to get Landon back into the team, he would not at first, but as day passes, the days when he thinks about the goals we made, eventually decided to join the team again. We knew that he did not mean it when he said he was going to quit. And yet, we talked, went out to eat, and took him back in with open arms.

The day of the state championship meet, we drove down, talked like the old times, and were nervous for the meet. We dreamed about going to the world championship, and winning excellence at states – the highest honor you can get in a robotics meet – so we worked with that goal in our heads. We want the past few months of our work to pay off in this meet, our finale.

It went well at the start, we won match after match, even as our robot kept on falling apart. I started to doubt our chances of even making it to the eliminations. But we were together, as Guppies, we had faith in us and were fixing the robot even at 2 A.M. We worked in Landon’s grandma’s house down at Portland, in her living room. Turned her living room into our robotics lab, drills, wires, and screws all over on the floor. We were exhausted, yelling at each other over tiny mistakes, but none of us quit. And somehow, we, the Guppies, pulled the robot back together.

The last day went by rough, but bittersweet. Our robot came out great, we won the excellence award – the golden ticket to worlds – as we wished. We still argue over the tiniest mistakes when we do robotics, but what team doesn’t argue? The Guppies might fight in the lab, but outside of robotics, we are the best robotics team, and we are unbreakable.