On any given spring afternoon, walk onto the GDS high school field. There’s a good chance you’ll encounter an eager sports team blissfully setting aside a few much-needed homework hours to run drills, scrimmage or shoot. Let the temperature drop a few degrees, and you may find yourself in a crowded gym with the women’s basketball squad. All year—if you drive out to the suburbs, that is—you can see runners giving up sizable chunks of their Saturdays to cheer for one another amid the frigid cold or blistering heat.
Extracurriculars take commitment. Any athlete can tell you that. Yet some forms of teamwork and dedication never step foot in the arena. Rather, a tiny, automated tube mechanism—not much longer than a paper towel roll—is the culmination of weeks of untouched lunches, abandoned plans and aimless troubleshooting.
All spring, Hopper Robotics team members spend numerous hours over the weekend programming and controlling a robot to shoot its own kind of ball—one that doesn’t swish. But, they say, the just-as-audible clinks and clangs, along with the camaraderie they build along the way, best even the rowdiest buzzer-beaters.
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The 2026 For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) Robotics season marks the seventh for Matthew Bachiochi, who founded the team in 2020 (though the majority of its inaugural year was suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic). In an interview with the Bit, Bachiochi explained that a passion for computer engineering as a child had led him to major in computer science. “I was always a little bit of a tinkerer,” he said. “I liked to take things apart when I was a kid and put them back together, kind of see how they worked.”
By establishing an extracurricular pathway for students interested in robotics, Bachiochi aimed to cultivate an affinity for the same kind of playful experimentation that compelled him in his youth. “I think the best thing for these kids is getting a real hands-on experience with engineering, and this program offers that in ways that they wouldn’t get inside the classrooms,” he said.
“When it comes to STEM extracurriculars, specifically at GDS, there’s a lot of great math and science tutoring,” senior and long-time robotics team member Quinn Shields said. “If you’re interested in engineering and STEM at GDS, this is the place that you can do it consistently.”
In January, FIRST launched the 2026 challenge, titled “Rebuilt,” in which robots must shoot yellow balls into a special type of basket and can climb rungs of a ladder to accumulate additional points.
Before assuming his current role at GDS as the high school innovation and computer science teacher in 2018, Bachiochi occupied a similar position at the Buckley School in New York City, where he stumbled upon Neal Bascomb’s The New Cool, a detailed depiction of the Dos Pueblos High School robotics team’s unlikely triumph at the 2009 FIRST Robotics Championship. In the book, Bascomb emphasizes the group’s defiance of the notion that competitive glory (and, as is often the case in a high school environment, its resulting popularity) could only be achieved through athletic pursuits.
“I read [The New Cool] at my previous job, and it was always something I would’ve loved to have done, but I wasn’t working with the high school age group,” Bachiochi said. “So when I came here, it was in the back of my mind, two years in, [to] kind of start this, and parents approached me about potentially starting a team my first year. That was something I jumped at the opportunity to do going into my second year.”
Inventor Dean Kamen—who built many types of machines, including the Segway Personal Transporter, a self-balancing electric scooter—founded FIRST in 1989. Kamen said at the time that he wanted to “compete for the hearts and minds of kids with the excitement of the Super Bowl.” Now, having served over four million children and spanning 114 countries, the non-profit aims to promote collaboration and spark creativity through three distinct engineering programs—the FIRST LEGO League, the FIRST Tech Challenge and the FIRST Robotics Competition.
Each year, the FIRST Robotics Competition introduces a challenge, supplying teams with a kit of parts and a set of criteria upon which to base their robot models. Beyond competition guidelines, however, much of the delegation is left up to the students themselves.
“I think independence is the key,” Chris Coogen, the innovation and computer science department chair, said. Along with Bachiochi, Coogen and substitute teacher Chris Light work closely with the Hopper Robotics team to develop and program their robot. “During the competition, it’s a series of designing, working, innovating and redesigning under pressure,” Coogen said. “And kind of handling that working as a team together, leaning on each other.”
For Bachiochi, scoring higher in tournaments has served as an indicator of the team’s growth. Hopper Robotics only competed once in 2020 before being forced to go on lockdown for the rest of the season. “But just getting a robot onto the field your rookie year is considered a win, because we didn’t know anything,” he said with a laugh.
“Our third year was the first time we got selected to be in somebody’s alliance for that tournament, which was kind of a big deal for us,” Bachiochi said. An alliance is a three-school coalition that forms after the preliminary rounds of a tournament and works together throughout the competition. “The fourth year, we actually were one of the captains, so we did the selecting for the first time. In our fifth year, we [qualified for] our regional championship for the first time, which was very exciting.”
Last year, Hopper Robotics won its first banner, becoming a district event winner at the regional competition in Pasadena, Maryland. While the victory was gratifying, the coaches explained, the skills that students learned along the way meant more: “Their hustle, their ability to design and build quickly, to work together to have a robot that does all of the things both going into the event and as we come out of an event, is a win that is not quite as visible as a banner hanging,” Bachiochi said.
The Hopper Robotics builders pour considerable time and effort into practice sessions in order to fully equip the robot for the numerous obstacles it must traverse. Freshman Max Hoffman explained that the 29 club members usually meet during lunch on Monday to lay out plans for the expectedly busy week that awaits them.
Even so, these weekly lunches do not usually offer enough time to pack in all the refinement the robot requires. In their free time, participants pay frequent visits to the Innovation Lab and contribute to the robot’s success in any way they can, but “there’s really nothing regimented,” Shields said. “It’s whatever we happen to be doing that day. There’s always something that needs to be done.”
“The nice thing for us is we can actually work on the robot between the weeks,” Bachiochi said, gesturing to the robot, which stood, somewhat presumptuously, right at the entrance to the Innovation Lab. “Our robot from last week looked a little bit different from our robot this week.”
Many experienced builders graduated last year, greatly changing the composition of the team. “This year, a lot of younger people designed and built it all,” Hoffman said.
Rather than being nervous about the team’s lack of experience, however, Coogen is excited to watch the students improve as they move through high school. “They will have two to three more years to really grow,” he said. “And I get to see that growth. So if they had a really successful season now, that’s going to be nothing but up as they get better at all the skills that they’ve learned this season.” In March, the Hopper Robotics’ alliance, which also included Mills E. Godwin High School and Douglas S. Freeman High School, placed third overall in the FCH (FIRST Chesapeake) District Glen Allen VA Event.
Most of all, the squad is happy to have fostered a home for students who want to explore the practical applications of STEM skills outside school. “What first led me to join the robotics team was FOMO,” Hoffman said. “The environment of the Innovation Lab itself is just great. I love Matthew, and then there’s two Chrises. They’re great. And just the type of kids that go there [the Innovation Lab], and the GDS community there, it’s pretty good.”
“The more they start to understand and work together, there’s camaraderie, and there’s friendship in it,” Coogen said animatedly. “There’s a like-minded desire to build. There’s a lot of laughter. There’s a lot of friendships being made. There’s a lot of giving ideas to each other. I think the special times are even, like, the bus ride to the competition. It’s wonderful to see the community really laughing.”
It isn’t just the little moments, though; just as Bachiochi intended, members of Hopper Robotics are learning skills that will aid them well past their high school years. Although Shields is not sure exactly what career he wants to pursue yet, he said that Hopper Robotics has taught him a crucial skill: teamwork.
Sophomore Randy Zhu agreed. “I probably won’t do anything directly with robotics, but I’ll do things related [to robotics]. As long as you’re trying to do anything STEM-related, Robotics Club is extremely helpful because it covers many areas.”
And Hoffman said his work on the 3D mockup of the robot has led him to consider studying architecture or engineering when he’s older.
After seven years, Hopper Robotics is starting to win more than ever. And who knows? One day, Bachiochi and his team may go on to win the FIRST Robotics World Championship—like a scene right out of The New Cool.