Andy Tsubasa Field
Milford MOJO’s “Emil” robot.
MILFORD — A robotics team of Milford area students placed first in its division during an international high school world championship in Houston.
Milford MOJO initially placed seventh in a division of more than 70 teams. The team’s spot among the top eight teams in the division allowed it to form an “alliance” with three other teams to go to the next round. During the playoffs, the team’s alliance lost one match, but won three others to advance to the finals, where it won a best-of-three contest to be declared “Championship Division Winners.”
“It’s an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime accomplishment that’s really hard to do. So I’m incredibly proud of our team,” said Seth Dalmacio, a Milford MOJO coach.
Hundreds of teams around the world qualified for the competition. Milford MOJO, which is made up of students from Jonathan Law High School, Foran High School and other area schools, recently qualified for the FIRST Championship for the second time.
This year, the team won one qualifying event, while finishing as runners up in another. The team also placed second in the New England FIRST District Championship, which featured the top teams in the region. Milford MOJO is ranked 12th among about 185 teams in New England based on this year’s results.
Teams competing in the world championship faced off against other teams in “alliances.” Like in the qualifying stages, they were tasked with getting their robot to pick up cones and cubes and place them in a section organizers call a “grid” to score points. The alliance with the most points won.
“The best teams there do about what’s called eight to 12 ‘pickups’ and ‘placements,’” Dalmacio said ahead of the event. “We were doing around six to seven.”
Milford MOJO raised more than $3,000 through a GoFundMe page to attend the world championships, funds that mostly went towards hotel and transportation costs. The team is still accepting donations for future competitions.
Ahead of competing in events this year, team members learned how to prototype the team’s robot, called “Emil,” before designing and manufacturing it, Dalmacio said.
Co-captain Violet Wilson, a Foran High School senior, joined the Milford MOJO about four years ago after participating in an elementary and middle school robotics league. She plans to study engineering and mathematics as a university student.
She said being on the team has made her more interested in the STEM fields.
“On the team, I learned how to use power tools, not something I was very familiar with,” Wilson said. “There’s also something about going through the process of having honestly kind of a terrifying challenge in front of you, which is make a functional robot that works in like four months.”
John Finnegan 
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