By Rachel Neglia
With the recent landing of the Mars rover Curiosity, excitement for robotic technology is spreading. Tempe Prep’s Robotics Club has shown this type of enthusiasm from its very beginning last year, when a group of friends decided to try something new. Their challenge was this: to design and build a viable robot within a six-week time frame and get it ready for the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC). But how did it all start?
Our school’s Robotics Club was founded last year by a group of students who had originally participated in Odyssey of the Mind. They decided to try something different and more technically challenging. According to the team website, “A combination of research and referrals led us to FIRST Robotics. It seemed like the perfect choice for our team … We already had a strong sense of community.”
This year, there are two new teams branching off from the original team: VEX robotics for freshmen and sophomores and the Junior Lego League for junior high students. “I anticipate the VEX robotics season to be an exciting and great learning experience,” predicts Josh Putrasahan, a sophomore on the team. Leo Lin, also a sophomore, believes that it will be “fun and interesting.”
All three of the challenging robotics programs offer new opportunities for students who are interested. Each team has a lot of work to do before their all-consuming competitions. Alumnus Gennaro DeLuca describes last year’s FRC competition as very intense. “It was an extremely stressful event for some members and it involved a lot of last minute fixes, wiring, and coding. Regardless, it was a lot of fun and I definitely learned a lot.”
Dave Dischinger, the main coordinator for the robotics teams, says that “with more experience this year, an earlier starting schedule, and more mentors, we should place substantially better in competition than last year,” but “our primary goal remains to simply increase the engineering and problem solving skill sets of the students.”
If you would like to find out more about the robotics teams, you can explore our website at www.tempeprep.org/tparobotics.