Area 53, The Eleanor Roosevelt High School Robotics team has entered the build season for their first competition of the year, hoping to improve upon the results they received last year.
Going from only a few members in the past to almost fifty this year, this club is hoping the increase in numbers will help their chances of winning at the competition this year. The main competition called F.I.R.S.T. (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) for robotics is held in March and students work diligently for a one month period to design and build a robot that fits the criteria of the challenge. This year, Area 53 has to build a robot that can climb a pole to put inner tubes on a wall. The number of inner tubes put on the wall is the number of points the team receives depending on how high up the robot is able to put the inner tubes.
Members of the club joined at various times during the beginning of the year. Enrollment is open until January, when the build season begins. “We’re always happy to get new members and train them in various aspects of the robotics team, not just the robots and programming,” said captain of the robotics team and ERHS junior Patrick Healey.
Robotics is also about graphic design and has a very heavy business aspect to it as well. The team made T-shirts and buttons as well with their team name on them. Healey admitted as far as the business aspect it was something the team often forgot to focus on. Healey said it is difficult “getting funding, because building these robots are really expensive, it goes up to $10,000 so we generally get grants from various engineering companies around the area.” Luckily, Roosevelt is in an area where there are a lot of engineering firms because of NASA Goddard. “What we do is put up proposals and explain what we want to do, what we want to teach people, what we want to show them and then we use that to get grant money,” Healey explained. The grant money the team recieved would then be used to build better robots.
The increase in enrollment this year was surprising to some of the senior members who remembered having only a dozen or less people on the team the year before. “last year I was the only freshman and I kind of liked it all by myself but this year there's 20 to 30 [freshmen],” said sophomore Jacky Cheng. Others were glad to see a rise in enrollment because this would hopefully give them a chance to do well at the competitions this year. Although there are so many new freshman on the team, that does not mean they are deprived of responsibility. “It can be difficult sometimes being a freshman on the robotics team because the older members, they kind of expect you to know what to do. It's not like they don't help if you don't know it, though,” said freshman Selena Healey.
Robotics is a well-loved club among those who are members of the team. Other than joining because students want to learn about building robots, a lot of students like the social scene as well. “I love being with all my friends, you know all the seniors, we get together and have a lot of fun,” said senior Paolo Cocchairo. “It's very interesting and it has taught me a lot about engineering that I never thought I'd understand,” he added. This was also a common idea among members of the club. Most members agreed they understood so much more about engineering and programming because of the club and even some of the real world aspects that they would otherwise not have been exposed to. “It’s a really good club, it really prepares students for what it’s like to have a science and technology career so it’s a lot of problem solving, a lot of real world issues like not enough time not enough money, working with other people. They all have to kind of come together and work together,” said sponsor of the robotics team and biology teacher Ms. Emily Moore.
Other than the sponsor, Ms. Moore, there are quite a few other adults who help with the team. Guru Ramu, a former ERHS student who was on the school's 2004 team, came back with another former student Laura Woodworth to restart the team four years ago. Ramu, now an engineering major at the University of Maryland acts as the mentor of the group, attending meetings, and is helping with whatever the team needs help with. “[I] am leading the mechanical teams in the actual construction of the robots,” said Ramu “Of course I have wonderful support from fellow mentors- Laura, and Hieu, who were both on the team with me in 2005.” Along with the mentors of the current team Ramu says he also receives support from Mr. Desch and Matt Zuckerman who were both his mentors in 2005. The other adult in charge of the team is Science and Technology coordinator Ms. Jane Hemelt. “I help with the funding part of the team, I'm in control of the money so that we can buy various things,” said Ms. Hemelt, “I'm here on Saturdays when the team is working so they can get in and out of the building and I’m like an emergency type person.”
With practices three or more times per week and a team that grew vastly in numbers since the previous year the ERHS robotics team is hoping to do well at the March robotics competition. They are also planning to attend several other events and competitions. These include demonstrations for Elementary school students, competitions called the Urban Challenge and the mini Urban Challenge, and the Real World Design challenge. The Urban Challenge is a competition in which students build a vehicle that has to be able to maneuver through a city on its own and the Real World Design challenge is a competition which is heavily focused on physics and building airplanes. The main focus right now is on creating a good robot and placing in the the F.I.R.S.T. competition.
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