Members of City High Raw Bacon Robotics watched intently as they learned about this year’s FRC robotics challenge. The students involved with City High’s robotics program attended the season kick-off event on September 7th to learn everything they need to know for the 2019-2020 robotics season. The event gives students a chance to learn about robotics at various workshops as well as find out about the team’s challenge for this year. For this year’s challenge, the goal is to build as tall of a Lego tower as possible with as small of a robot as possible.

There are three types of members on the robotics team. Robotics participants can be either builders, coders, or outreach members to work on the engineering notebook and social media. Builders help create the hardware design and build the robot. Coders program the robots so they can make it through the autonomous and controlled phases of the competition. The outreach members put together the engineering notebook which demonstrates to the competition judges how the robot was engineered.

Luke Aschenbrenner ‘21 is one of the lead coders on the team and is looking forward to being very involved this year. 

“The robot uses sensors to try to do stuff on its own. I’m hoping that this year, our programming team can make it more advanced, so we can complete more challenges and get more points,” Aschenbrenner said. 

In an effort to be more organized this year, the team is implementing new programs.

“Last year, it was kind of hard for programming to collaborate because we had everybody on a separate program; we each worked on the same thing all by ourselves,” Aschenbrenner said. “This year, we’re using a special software that’s like Google Docs so we can all work on the same thing.”

Sophomore Ben Faden is new to the team this year, and he is excited to be a part of the meets in the upcoming season.

“I really like meets because you get a chance to actually test all the work we’ve put into our robots,” Faden said. “[Competitions] are exciting because they get really intense when you have to do everything on the fly.”

In addition to creating robots, the club makes an emphasis on inclusion and creating a good community for all its members. 

“[The team] cares a lot about being kind to each other,” Faden said. “The best part is just being with people and working on a whole project together.” 

Club sponsor Christine Mons considers her role to be one of guidance, and ensuring that everyone has a place on the team. 

“One of the main things that students come away with is real-world leadership experience,” Mons said. “Through our team successes, our team failures, we collectively pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and keep going. That’s how we can impart that sense of team—team ownership and team responsibility. That’s our goal.”

Aschenbrenner echoes Mons’s sentiment and agrees that robotics teaches members about teamwork and inclusion.

“I just think it’s cool to be able to work together as a team, and then see other teams and talk with them to see what they’re doing,” Aschenbrenner said. “[Robotics] has definitely helped me learn how to work better as a team and to include more people.”