Robotics Team Builds Character While Building Robots

After their unique season, Ella was asked to write an article for a local magazine about her Robotics Team experience. Robotics ended up being such an important part of our lives this year, and a life-changing experience for Ella, I'm gonna paste her words from her article here, along with some pictures of the team working and having fun this year! (Edited to remove specifics about our school.)

Whether it be wiring control panels, creating carbon fiber, coding a robot to pelt balls at a target, or chugging a two-liter bottle of Sprite, our high school Robotics Team is always up to something interesting! These hard working students take on the challenge of building, coding, and competing a robot made from scratch in the First Robotics Competition each year, while forming bonds and having tons of fun along the way.

Coached by mechanical engineer Mr. U., along with a few brave mentors, the Robotics Team mainly focuses on educating students in coding, engineering, and all together coming up with creative ideas, and learning about teamwork. This year’s team was made up of 8 student participants, 7 of them freshmen. While there was a lot to learn, this team proved to be a capable, quick-learning group, who built a robot they all were proud of. The robot, dubbed “Rookie”, boasted the ability to recognize and line up with a target, launch dodge balls into a goal, and suck up discarded dodge balls to funnel into the launcher. As cool as it may be, this robot only came together because of the commitment of every team member and their specialties.

The Robotics Team is split into two primary groups: the programmers and the engineers. The programmers troubleshoot and come up with solutions, testing their code on a robot from past years in a wide open space in the school’s Industrial Arts Building. The engineers, consisting of the majority of the team, jump between prototyping, wiring, building the robot, and working with carbon fiber. When the robot is almost complete, it’s all hands on deck to finish the rest of the wiring and pnematics in one long night. Once the robot has been tested and tuned, it’s off to competitions! 

The First Robotics Competition, or FRC, has robotics teams from around the world compete in a specific game that was revealed at the beginning of the season. The game usually includes multiple tasks and objectives for the robot to execute, with a scoring system based on how well it completes the task, with higher points awarded for more difficult actions. This year, the assigned objectives were to pick up dodge balls, shoot them into easy, medium, and hard targets with points rewarded accordingly, recognize colors on a color wheel, and lift themselves off the ground for bonus points at the end of the match. Competitions are a great experience for teams to interact with other teams, showcase their robots, admire other robots, and finally see all the hard work of the team come to fruition. 

Unfortunately, due to the Covid-19 outbreak, most competitions were canceled this year, including both competitions our school's Robotics Team was scheduled to compete in. This was especially sad as most of the team had never experienced a match before. The team was able to see the beginning of a competition, which included setting up their pit station and checking out other teams’ robots. While the actual element of going head-to-head with an opponent didn’t happen, team members still say that it was fun to get a taste, seeing other schools’ robots and getting to hang out together.

The end of this Robotics season proved to be a disappointing one, but all of the Robotics Team members report that they had an awesome experience being on the team and having the ability to make something extremely cool. Lots of learning still happened, ranging anywhere from discovering how to install a non-lethal computer virus to debating about if Cool Ranch Doritos are indeed the best kind of chips.

This upcoming season will host the same game so that all the robots created this year can still compete. Extra elements will be added to the games, and teams will have an entire school year to create an amazing robot, instead of just the regular single semester. This poses an exciting year for FRC, promising some very interesting robots with lots of time to make the competing robots perfect. Our school is excited about the opportunity to take their robot to a whole new level, while learning new things and spending time with teammates who have become great friends!

(Blog Editor's note: I'm such a proud RoboMom!!!)