It was pretty easy to pick up on The RoHawks’ excitement on Stop Build Day. There were no panicked rushing and pressure for fixing the last piece. Instead, it was a night of lively discussion, fun practice and tasty pizza.
When I joined, the team was talking about the robot’s name. Assistant Principal, Lisa Siegmann, explained this was, “in part to honor the founding teacher at HCHS who scraped together the very first RoHawks team four years ago, math teacher Ms. Carolyn Mayadas who passed away this fall.” After this sweet tribute, I talked to the students about their season.
“What’s really awesome is it’s actually a complete robot. Everything about it works. Everything about it can play the game,” said co-captain Axel. Rachel, their other captain noted, “in the past we’ve been nowhere near this point with the robot on stop build day and working until midnight, tweaking things and not feeling fully confident about them.”
What made this year so different? The captains explained how the team implemented a much more structured process with the build. “Generally we say this works and start making it. The year we dedicated a couple of weeks to making prototypes,” said Axel. After the team continued to evaluate and improve until they had a final prototype a few weeks back. Then starting from scratch, they made a concerted process to CAD and document what they did.
The team also followed a KISS – Keep It Simple Students – approach. Rachel said, “I feel really confident about this robot because it’s all the things that a robot should be. It’s simple. The design has only two mechanisms that work really nicely together.”
Noah, a senior in his 3rd year at FIRST and the lead programmer, echoed this point. “Last year we tried to do too much. This year was about making everything simple and elegant. We about talked about driving and there was more thought ahead of time about how to we want to set this up for the driver.” One great benefit of this approach is a sonar mechanism they have built on the robot. Using color coded lights, the driver will be able to tell the best place to shoot.
The season did bring some hiccups. No one can escape the heavy snow storms. Douglas a sophomore in his second year on the team, informed me how they lost practices and had to cancel their scrimmage at Herbert H. Lehman High School in the Bronx. “Because of the snow, trucks couldn’t come with the materials we needed. We cancelled and lost important time to for planning for the assist element.” The team also encountered an issue with the compression of the robots arms, but was able to resolve it.
Perhaps what’s made this all possible is the team itself. Noah admitted, “organization is one of the hardest things to get” but he explained how the team structured itself into mini-teams. “Everybody’s on a team – C&C team, assembly team, etc.” It allowed team members to focus on getting good at something they’re interested in.
Rachel also observed although this is the first year with no founding members that everyone stepped up to their roles. “We’ve spent the past five years as a team evolving and developing new skills and technologies. I feel like this year we’ve really become one of the leading veteran teams and we have a really good robot to show for it.”
Photographs provided by Miles Shebar, yearbook photographer at Hunter High School
