Four Pierce students, Alkinoos Anastasopoulos, Antonios Vlahakis, Stylianos Karachalios and Alexandros Panagiotis Rambauske, together with the professor and Head of the Lyceum Computer Science Department, Mr. Fotis Katsochristos, represented Greece and Pierce in the Beaver Works Summer Institute (BWSI) of MIT final challenge of Racecar Educational Robotics Competition, having won 1st place in Greece, in the national Racecar Challenge competition!

Our students attended the last week of the Beaver Works Summer Institute (BWSI) 2026 at MIT, Boston (July 26 to August 2), while 9 BWSI teams and 5 visiting teams from Greece, Canada, Japan, as well as 2 teams from Syracuse University in New York participated in the Competition!

All teams were asked to program an autonomous vehicle to respond to a variety of challenges, make high-level decisions based on visual perception in order to complete a circuit of the track. 

In the first test, Time Trials, the car drives itself on the track, recording only time, in order to create the ranking for the second test, the Grand Prix. Our team ranked 5th in the overall ranking and 2nd among visiting teams, while in the Grand Prix it finished in 7th place.

The program is based on the Python and Robotics course RACECAR Neo Mathisi 2026 (RACECAR Neo), designed by the BWSI of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).