Every Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday, room 720 is reserved for the Robotics Club. The 2023 robotics season is kicking off strong navigating the hardships that coincide with innovation.
“There’s nothing like it on campus. It’s a place where you actually get to apply what you learned in class and do something like hands on,” said senior Ashwin Bardhwaj, Club President.
Each season, the Robotics team prepares for the regional competition by starting with a game that includes parameters given to them by FIRST Robotics (the organization in which they compete with). Members then collectively brainstorm ideas on how to perform the assigned task. Afterwards, these ideas are evaluated. The focus is to think about the game from various perspectives and list out the pros and cons of each idea. Once an idea is settled on, each member breaks off and participates in different disciplines. Whether it be mechanical or electrical, each student contributes their best efforts into making their ideas become a reality.
There are no qualifications necessary to be in this club. Students who join need little prior knowledge about engineering but must be willing to learn something new.
“I believe in learning by doing, like learning through experience,” said Bardhwaj.
The main goal of the club is to work through the successes and failures of each idea, and learn from it along the way. Watching an idea come to life after all the hard work that was applied, is the reward that every member walks away with at the end of each season. Through continuous problem solving, a community of innovative thinkers has grown because of it.
“The actual organization we compete with says, ‘We don’t build robots, we build kids through robots,’” said senior Erin Beckwith, a member that has been a part of the Robotics Club since their freshman year.
An emphasis on learning something new is permanently instilled in the minds of creative thinkers, like Ashwin. The biggest lesson that each member in the Robotics Club has learned: there is no such thing as a stupid idea.