The JC Robotics team was composed of four seniors boys. The team, led by Jason Yan, also included Mark Ghattas, Robbie Hauf, and Chance Woosley and was moderated by Dr. Tony Davidson and Mrs. Jennifer Pearson.

The boys competed in VEX Robotics Competitions (VRC). VRC is a competitive robotics program that began back in 2007, and JC started competing in 2017.
Captain Jason Yan joined the robotics team during his freshman year. He came to the team without any robotics experience and quickly picked up on the skills and programming needed to make a great robot.
He said, “It had been an amazing four years, and everything started back in the very beginning of my freshman year. I got a random email asking if anyone was interested in doing robotics and decided to try it out, and little did I know, this decision just dragged me into four years of robotics.”
Seniors Mark Ghattas, Robbie Hauf, and Chance Woosley joined the team only this year but made an impact on the team’s growth.
Mark said, “It was most of our team’s first year, so I sometimes think how good we would have been if we had three more years to compete.”
Although they were only together as a team for a year, the guys ended the year with a lot of memories together.
Robbie said, “We all competed in California for a national competition. It was fun to get to be in a hotel together and go to places like In-N-Out.”
Mark’s favorite memory is The Maryland VRC High School State Championship. This competition consisted of a skills event, a tournament event and various judged awards. In the skills event, the team ranked second and qualified in first place for the tournament event to become the State Champions.
This accomplishment allowed them to participate in the world event held in Dallas, Texas last month.
At this competition, the team won the Think Award for their skilled program strategies and was able to make it to finals of their division.
Chance said, “Being on the robotics team has allowed me to get closer to my closest friends and to work effectively as a team. It’s taught me a lot about programming and physics because I’ve been able to apply my work to a physical project. I’m not ready for the team to be finished competing.”
As for how some of the guys see robotics in their future, each has a different outlook.
Robbie said, “I will be able to use the same skills of design and planning that I used in robotics to help me in my career in mechanical engineering.”
Mark sees robotics as a hobby and added, “I’m more interested in the back-end software portion of computer science.”
Jason said, “I believe whenever I look back on the things I experienced in these four years, I will be happy that my team and I went through all of these together, making JC Robotics a name to be remembered in the VEX community of Maryland and even the whole world.”
Dr. Davidson said, “These four gentlemen have surpassed my expectations with what they were able to achieve this year and have taught me so much. An example has been set a model for which future teams can use to succeed.”