A 115-pound, award-winning robot named Dave was the center of attention on Monday night at Dos Pueblos High School.

Octobots Robotics 9084, the school’s robotics team, and community members gathered to say farewell to their beloved robot at a retirement party on the Goleta campus.

The party included a live demonstration of Dave’s skills and stations set up where team members showcased past robots and taught community members about the technology behind building a robot.

Dave looks toward retirement with an impressive legacy that includes competing in three robotic tournaments and ending the official season ranked in the top 5% of FIRST Robotics teams worldwide, top 5% in the country and top 7% in the California region. 

“It’s bittersweet. We put so much time into building this robot and designing it, and then watching it break on the field and fixing it. Having to start from scratch and build another robot next year is definitely going to be sad,” team president and senior Zeo Pereira said.

Dave’s award-winning skills include picking up a ball and tossing it over a bar, placing PVC pipes accurately onto a rack, and the autodrive feature.

Pereira describes the competitions as robotic teams playing the same game with the same pieces but different strategies. At the beginning of the season, Octobots Robotics 9084 had to figure out their strategy to take into competitions. 

The FIRST Robotics 2025 season was ocean-themed, titled “REEFSCAPE.” Dave picks up a ball called the algae, PVC pipes that are the coral, and the rack where the pipes go on is the reef.

Senior Autumn Thibeau admired her work on Monday night, proudly pointing out the extension to Dave’s claw that she designed to help it grab onto the ball.

“I was so proud every time it worked,” she said.

The team began to build Dave in January, taking eight weeks to complete. Each January, teams find out what kind of robot they are tasked to build. 

This year, the team who built Dave is a “pretty scrappy new team,” according to mentor and Dos Pueblos parent Elaine Mah Best. Additionally, the team has no official workplace and instead shares a space with the custodial team.

“This is our first robot as a team after graduating a lot of seniors, so it was a sort of rookie team,” Pereira said.

Octobots Robotics 9084 is not part of the Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy but instead is made up of students and volunteers who mentor the students. 

That also means that the team does not receive regular funding, according to Mah Best. Parents and mentors donate to help fund the creation of the robot. The team needs a minimum of $125,000 each year to support the work.

Pereira said the team put in about 30 hours a week toward building Dave, adding that he would work on Dave for five hours a day after school.

“I was working through all my lunch and my one free class period to get all my homework done so that right after school was out I could immediately go to work on robotics until I went to sleep,” he said. 

California is a competitive robotics region because of the state’s bustling technology regions, according to Mah Best.

“There’s a lot of competition in this area, and that’s great because it helps drive us,” she said. 

Despite retirement from competing, Dave will continue to teach the community about science, technology, engineering and math at elementary schools and community fairs. 

The robotics team plans to build a new robot for the next season in January to take to more competitions.