On their final build day, students label wires and replace wheels and otherwise tinker with their robot. Next to them is a 7-foot-tall scale made from $700 worth of lumber, though the team got it half-price from Lowe’s.

Stephen Cloudas, the driver for the robot, drills some breathing holes. Nearby is a yellow CNC machine – a computer-controlled, three-dimensional cutting device – that the team bought used for $5,000 from a seller in Pennsylvania.

Elsewhere are cut-up pool noodles that will act as bumpers on the robot, milk crates zipped in yellow FIRST Robotics covers, drills, and a row of computers.

The Fitch High School robotics team, called the Aluminum Falcons, has been meeting in the gymnasium of Pleasant Valley Elementary School.

This is the first time the team has had a designated space, which means members don’t have to spend 45 minutes setting up and another 45 cleaning up. It means they have 10 times the space to work. It means they’re not spilling from a room into the hallway, and they can stay to work later in the evenings, and they can work on snow days.

“This is the single biggest thing that’s helped our team,” said faculty adviser Brian Chidley, a physics teacher at Fitch.

He’s not sure where the Aluminum Falcons will meet once Pleasant Valley is sold. Superintendent Michael Graner noted there hasn’t yet been movement on the sale of the building.

But the workspace struggles have not been evident in the Aluminum Falcons’ performance. Last year, the team won four competitions – in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey and New Hampshire – before heading to the FIRST Robotics Competition World Championship in St. Louis.

The nationwide FIRST Robotics Competition kicked off Jan. 6, when teams were informed of the challenge. The game this year is for the robot to pick up cubes – the covered milk crates – and put them on a scale. Three teams work together against three other teams, with each alliance trying to tip the scale in its favor.

That’s the simple explanation. There’s also a smaller scale called a switch, a human element that allows for power-ups and a bonus for the robot elevating above a platform.

“Our programming team uses code to program, like Xbox controllers, and the drive team, which is two students, we tell what buttons to push,” explained senior Eva Chamard, operator of the robot.

Students are given SolidWorks, a computer-aided design and engineering program, free to use each year.

Working on the afternoon of Feb. 20, students faced a midnight deadline to stop working on their robot and bag it up. They will have another six hours to tweak the robot prior to their first competition of the season, in Bridgewater, Mass. March 9-11.

But the time between Feb. 20 and March 9 involves building and testing a replica robot, which will help them identify what alterations need to be made to the original.

The students are doing all of this with the help of about 10 Electric Boat engineers, along with volunteers from Pfizer.

The EB mentors each put in at least 30 hours of work a week, said Kevin Harrilal, lead robotics engineer for EB.

He said that the point of FIRST Robotics isn’t about building the robot, or about winning.

“It’s really about taking engineers and teachers and parents, who are excelling in their individual fields, and putting them to work with students who may not know what they want to do in life,” Harrilal said. He added, “It’s not about robotics; it’s about confidence.”