I never wanted to do robotics: I was an ARTISTE! In fact, I was far beyond upset when my parents forced me to join my little brother’s team (there went my art classes!). But now, I cannot even imagine a time in my life without competitive robotics.
It didn’t start well. My first team consisted of my little brother and four of his friends. I think maybe the coaches knew that they needed someone a little older than the five 10-year olds, and that girls in robotics always impress the judges. Why else would my brother have blurted to my parents “Coach says we need an OLDER Sister to join the team or we can’t go to the tournament”? In any case, despite my countless arguments against joining, I was signed up and dropped off at the next practice. At some point, in between the dumb roughhousing and after realizing that if you put plastic parts in the hands of little boys, the miscreants will gleefully snap them together and apart, time after time, creating useless “laser guns” and misshapen “space racers” until they are distracted by brighter, shinier pieces (never accomplishing their assigned tasks), I realized that creating things that did something was really rewarding.
When we finally went to tournament that year, I was completely invested in our robot and our project. During rehearsal, I actually “froze”, forgetting lines I’d written for myself. When my “missions” didn’t work during competition I threw myself into correcting them and with one giant leap of intuition succeeded in the final round of the day! When we won 3rd Place and qualified for Regionals at LEGO LAND (where the judges took pity on us and presented us with the Humorous Robot Award– an award they made up on the spot and gave us hardware for!) I almost hyperventilated telling my mom about our ascendance. Looking back, I can see that I’d already transformed from an Artiste to an Roboteer, but I didn’t realize it.
Since then, I’ve competed every year and every year has been an adventure. I’m not the best builder, nor the best programmer, but, I’ve persevered and every year I’ve found ways to put my talents to use and every year we win a little more. During my first year in VEX, as a freshman in High School, we qualified and competed at the World Championships despite a disfunctional team with members that bickered more than they built some meetings. Now, I’m the President of a team that I helped win 3rd AND 4th in the world last year! But my biggest Robo-adventure wasn’t in any tournament. This past summer, I taught robotics in three incredibly different environments: at the UW’s Gifted program, at a wealthy school in urban India and at an incredibly poor school in rural India.
In their own ways, each was an incredible learning experience: the kids in America were all so smart, yet my challenge was to motivate and focus them. These kids were smart, no doubt, but they grew up in an environment that fostered their abilities and reminded them so. Thus, these kids always tried to ask for more and more challenges, even though they had not even completed their original tasks, and were in general, harder to manage. In India, the rich kids were similar, but more tolerant of inefficiency and better able to keep focus; while the poor kids were so thirsty for knowledge and thankful for the meager time and equipment I had for them. In fact, I had never seen such well-behaved students before I saw the students of the two schools in India! The plastic-in-hand syndrome that comes as a package deal with Legos appeared at a smaller scale in these children; despite their never seen Legos or Robots before in their lives. Due to their gratefulness of being the privileged students participating in a “foreign Robotics” class, the Indian students hung onto every single word I said, eager to be learning such an exotic subject! In all cases, I found robotics to be an amazing catalyst for learning. The students developed presentation skills, became more fluent in spoken English, worked well in teams, started thinking logically, and grasped all skills quickly and diligently. But above all, these brilliant kids were as humble as ever, and their humility struck me as they successfully mastered basic concepts after concepts and delved into harder programming challenges. Never could I have imagined the scene as I was driven away from the poor country school where I had just given a 4 hour class, with only enough equipment to make four robots shared between 30 kids: the car was mobbed by appreciative kids, running after us, waving, shouting “Nandri Sahana maam”. I wasn’t sure if I was laughing or crying but I know I’ll never forget that moment and that robotics got me there.
Robotics is one of those things I never thought I’d do. Robotics is an activity my neighbor, Ethan, on the other hand, would fall in love with. Ethan doesn’t talk much; his default answer for every question is “maybe.” But when it comes to robotics, I can never get Ethan to stop talking. Every single day, on the bus, Ethan would not stop telling me stories about his robotics practices and competitions. He told me stories about this kid named Rishi, whom I would later meet, and how Rishi tried to screw in a kepnut backwards. He told me about some of the other kids, and I would constantly hear stories about how Jasper’s driving almost got the team disqualified from a match, and how Gaby would program robots in the car in his pajamas on the way to competitions. Finally, I decided that though the team sounded super strange, they also sounded super likeable, and maybe I should try out.
When I decided to try out, Ethan described a brutal process to me. He told me that not many kids make the cut, and the team is extremely picky about who they like. I thought I had zero chance. After all, I barely knew how to screw in a screw, let alone build a robot. I even called kepnuts “flower screws” since I didn’t know many names of the pieces.
Before my first practice, I asked Ethan if I should do anything or research anything so I wouldn’t seem completely lost. He told me to go on the Vex robotics site and learn the name of the parts. He would point to a part and matter-of-factly say, “It’s called a C-channel because it looks like a ‘C.’ Duh.” Not the most reassuring thing to hear.
After a few practices, I seemed to get along well with the rest of the team, which Ethan told me was pretty rare. One night, in the midst of dinner, the phone rang and my mom handed it to me, saying it was from David, our coach. I thought I was getting rejected by the team. Couldn’t they at least do it in person? To my surprise, David said, “We just won B-tournament and the team’s at a Mexican restaurant. The team unanimously decided that we want you on the team. Would you like to join WASABI?” I immediately thought to myself that they had the wrong number. They would be crazy to choose a girl with zero experience who barely knew how to build. But before I knew it, a few weeks later, I had my own WASABI jersey, which I could proudly wear to competitions, even though the jersey comes down to my knees and the neon green color is blinding.
Now, after being on WASABI for almost a year, I not only learned how to use a bandsaw, drill holes in polycarb, and wire up a robot, but I was finally able to apply some skills I learned from school. I thought all the formulas I had to memorize at school were pretty useless- when am I ever going to need trigonometry in real life? This year, in Nothing But Net, we actually used right triangle trig to calculate distances and angles to the net from various spots on the field.
Also, I know robotics is so much more than just building a bot and taking it to competitions. I have so many memories, no matter how strange, that I’ll never forget. I’ll never forget that time Jasper ate seven donuts alone, and those moments when Eric happily sings “Everything is Awesome”, Rishi scooters around like a little kid after practice, and Gaby wears his android pajamas to practice. It’s hard to forget our trip to the US Open last year in Omaha, where we couldn’t find a restaurant past 8 PM, when David accidentally drove off with a coffee mug on the car’s roof, and when the team decided to go to the hotel’s gym and lift weights together.
Two years ago, if you asked me what I thought of robotics, my answer was like a scene out of a movie. I envisioned a bunch of nerds, all with braces and giant safety goggles, arguing about the velocity of their robot and the optimal angle to shoot with. Now, if you asked me what robotics is like, I wish I could say that I was proven wrong. Truth is, my team is a group of nerds with giant safety goggles arguing about physics and mechanics. But now, I proudly say that I’m a part of that team of nerds, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Who knew that the activity that I despised the most would become the activity I would tirelessly pursue?
