From social clubs to snowboarding, SHHS has it all. The clubs the school offers range from fun indoor activities like board games to clubs for outdoorsy people, such as mountain biking. Depending on what you like, there is a good chance Science Hill has it. If you just happen to be a STEM-centered person, the robotics club is for you.
Every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, the SHHS Robotics Club meets to construct their robots and have fun in the lab. The task is simple: build a robot to compete in a competition. Teams work together to do this, and over a few months, they will work hard to plan, design, and create their machines. Aside from that, you have the chance to meet new people and express creativity using your team’s robot.
So what even is the purpose of the club? Well, other than constructing automations, the club members are working hard to have a chance to participate in a competition for their category; either First Robotics or Vex Robotics, depending on what the team chose at the beginning of the year. Vex, being a competition for new learners of robotics, is easier than its more advanced counterpart, First, which requires the team to make their parts as well as construct them.
During an interview with the robotics team, I got the chance to speak with a few head members and the build teams. As a member myself, I asked questions to my team and others who were there that day, and of the people I interviewed, many expressed their love for engineering and the like. One of my team members, Mason Woodby, shared his views on robotics, saying, “I view robotics as an opportunity to get away from, you know, the sadness of life and it allows me to have the opportunity to connect with others that have the same likeness as me.” He adds, “Not only is getting to express yourself in, uh, with materials and the world around you is great, it’s another form of art.”
Other members had similar opinions about the club. For example, Samantha Wilder, who has led the club as a project manager, along with a few other upperclassmen that I got to interview. She believes that robotics is, in her words, “…more of an experience than a club. A lot of people take away different things from robotics when they come here, some of them come here for the community, some of them come here to learn more about STEM, and some of them come here to kind of build up some credentials, it can kind of be whatever you want it to be.”
Brayden O’Neil is another senior in the robotics team who is head of the electrical aspect of the robot– when asked about his view on the club, he said, “It’s a sense of community, um, so, while we have the robots themselves, we also, you know, have teams, we have friends, we make friends on the team itself and we, you know, when it comes to competition time, we’re all together all the time.”
Other than the building aspect of the robot, different teams handle different tasks, such as electrical, programming, design, and marketing. At first, I wondered why there was a marketing team in a robotics club. However, Lillian Ellis, the marketing director of the club explains it all. “I help raise money for our team,” she begins, “I help give us exposure, I am in charge of social media, Outreach, stuff like that. When we present to the school board or we go to the elementary schools, I’m the one that runs that, and I raise the money for the robots– a lot of our robots require thousands of dollars to make and I help fund them, I guess.”
The robotics club is a great place to be when you want to get creative. Whether it’s school stress or just boredom, a few hours of hands-on fun can be the ailment. Most importantly, it is the people who make the club what it is today: a safe space for young engineers who cherish every part of putting together a robot piece by piece, making friends along the way.
