SEATTLE-Many people know O'Dea senior Declan Shea-McMahon as someone who plays on the football team, most recently winning the 2024 3A Gridiron Classic. Although this is an amazing achievement, football doesn't last forever, and eventually, you have to move on. McMahon, however, has already found his path towards his next step in life by pursuing robotics.
During his freshman year, when he attended Seattle Lutheran High School, he joined their robotics team, Team Seabot, and became a key member of an already very small team. As a freshman, he would be the head electrical engineer managing what electrical components needed to go onto the robot and how they needed to be wired. He would also learn lifelong skills such as sautering and designing custom circuit boards. In addition to all of this, he would be a crucial part of the drive team, being one of the youngest-ever operators in the history of Team Seabot.
This would lead to a huge program first, "They won the district championship," said McMahons mom.
After winning the program's first-ever district championship, the team would have to shut down due to not having enough students enrolled for the next school year. McMahon would then take a significant amount of time to decide upon his next steps. After two years, before his senior year, he joined a community team still part of the same FRC competition: Skunkworks robotics. This opportunity allows McMahon to get his feet wet once again, as this is the field of work he will major in when college rolls around.
Another reason he wanted to be back on a robotics team is the environment of the competitions: "The energy in the air is electric. The kids are all dressed up, and each team has a mascot, and the mascots are weird. They're like part animal, part robot, or they're like part Harry Potter and part robot, and the people who are there cheering for that team are also dressed up," said McMahon's mom.
This is what McMahon is currently working on with his team as the season has gotten underway. Each year, teams have to build a robot to complete tasks that aren't released until kickoff day. This year, that day was January 4th, and the game for this season is called Reefscape, a water-themed game where teams must hang coral onto a reef to get points or remove and place algae into a net. In this year's game, the time for each match is divided into two segments. The first is an autonomous period where there is no human input to the robot. It is all coded and only lasts the first 15 seconds of the match. The last 2:15 minutes of each game is a teleop period where you can control the robot. The goal is to rack up as many points as possible to get ranking points or RP. Once you reach a certain threshold of RP, you can qualify for the regionals and, after that, the world championships, competing against the best teams across the planet down in Houston, Texas, in mid-April.
McMahon hopes to continue an incredible senior year by adding a world championship to the trophy cabinet before he goes off to college. If you want to watch and embrace the environment of a robotics match, make sure to make your way over to Sammamish High School from March 7th to 9th.
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