By Steph Toste
When competition day hits, the Branford Hornets Robotics Club puts out their best efforts to collaborate and problem solve their way to the top. This was the case on February 8 at the American School For The Deaf in West Hartford, when the team came in seventh overall, earning a spot in the state competition on Saturday, February 22 when we finished 14th.
Never heard of robotics? That’s probably because the club is only in its second year. Last year, three of the seniors, Christian Bjork, Dan DeCerbo O’Brien, and Joshua Josephy-Zack approached Mr. Peterson about starting a robotics club. Mr. Sarrasin and Mr. Peterson stepped up and since then the team has flourished into what it is today.
This club is not only filled with many amazing and brightly talented people from our own school, but we’ve brought in students from the middle school as well in an attempt to increase our outreach for FIRST Tech Challenge Robotics competitions and the awareness of STEM altogether. Everyone in the club strives to create a comfortable environment in which everyone is part of the building and testing of the robot.
Of course, there’s also the robot.
Each year workers at the First Tech Challenge organization design a creative game with extensive rules and post a video of those rules on their website for each school to see. Using this as our guide, we are tasked with brainstorming, designing, building, coding and troubleshooting an entire robot from scratch with whatever materials we are able to obtain. Meeting two days a week for two hours – sometimes way more than that during what one of our seniors, Max Padian likes to call “panic weeks” as the competition creeps up on us – we’re able to take an extensive amount of time finding what can could be improved to make our robot the best it can be.
All of that prepared us for the competition Feb. 8.
When we all finally piled onto the bus at 6:00 AM that Saturday morning, we knew that although we were in for a long day, we were in for a fun day too. From making friends on other teams and watching our school mascot have a dance battle with the American School For The Deaf’s tiger mascot to battling it out in the actual competitions themselves and achieving our goal of making it to states to the very first time, the day was truly one to remember. Whether it was last minute fixes of the robot or scouting other teams, there was always something to occupy our time with.
While the team is all about learning the design and build aspects of technology, there’s much more that goes into the robotics community. We are told as First Tech Challenge members that we must have “gracious professionalism.” This is a term coined by Dr. Woodie Flowers, a Distinguished Advisor of FIRST. This concept is emphasized at every single competition, and it teaches a lot about being a team.
In a competition, if you are mean to another teammate, you will actually receive a penalty for it. This is FIRST’s way of showing that, not only does your robot matter, but the people you compete with matter. The way you treat others matters.
Having just finished our state competition, it’s tough to say goodbye to this ragtag team. We came in fourteenth place overall out of the twenty four teams that were competing that day. The night before our robot was having major issues and we ended up staying at the school until 8:30 to try and fix it, only to run into a dead end (#grindseason). We got to the competition with a lot of stress as the robot was still running into major issues, but a team member from the Hopkins Grey team came over and showed some “gracious professionalism” by helping us to get past that problem. From then on we ran into more issues, but nothing that we couldn’t handle in the end, and honestly? It wouldn’t have been robotics if we didn’t run into a few mishaps in the process.
Lastly, there are too many good memories created during the robotics season that it’d be difficult to not include them here. The countless Dunkin Donuts runs to buy sometimes even 100 munchkins and the late night meetings with pizza are essential to get us through the season. Some of our team has also taken to trying to find times to go outside during competitions and explore the area around the school we visit. And we can’t forget: getting ice cream after the competition that we qualified for states during. Planning a surprise senior day, blasting songs on the bus and talking to members of other teams are all also things that just make robotics really great.
“Having started this team from nothing, it brings me great joy to see what an amazing group of thinkers have blossomed in realizing this dream,” Josh said. “I’m a lucky guy to get to lead these talented students in solving a daunting set of tasks each season. I really am truly proud of what we have created and maintained here at BHS.”
All in all, the FIRST community is a very welcoming one, one that we are all proud to be a part of here on team Branford Hornets: 15533.
Come get involved next year, it’s a lot easier than you think, and you might just make some amazing memories along the way.
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