Character and Charisma #3

Sometimes moms know best no matter how much we don’t want to admit it. In 7th grade my mom thought it would be beneficial for me to join my middle school robotics club. Initially, I was hesitant. What did she know about robotics, and more importantly, what did I possibly know about robotics? She dragged me to my first meeting where I looked around the room and realized I did not know anyone else in the club. For many meetings I sat there rolling my eyes, on the verge of falling asleep. In order to introduce the new members to the different components of robotics, the 8th grade team members held a workshop introducing all of the groups. I stopped rolling my eyes the second I saw how fascinating the programming behind the robotics was. Enamored by its complexity, it was at that very moment I realized my mom was right. 

The next team meeting, I signed up for the programming group. We were all completely different, besides our shared love for programming. Throughout our next couple meetings led by our computer skills teacher, Mrs. Breeden, we were able to collaborate with each other in order to solve common programming problems. Having to meet with each other twice a week, we quickly grew closer and bonded over our shared passion. During our first project, we sat there trying to create an autonomous program for one of the Lego Vex team’s bots. It took us several meetings, lots of failures, but in the end we were able to create something that was able to work 10% of the time (A huge feat within the middle school programming realm). As the school year went on, we grew very close and would even eat lunch together in the robotics room. Once we were all able to create a program for our individual teams, the group disbanded. The programmers had no work besides finding interesting youtube videos to watch while the rest of the team scrambled to fix their decaying bots.

The high school followed a very similar format to the team in the middle school. We had many Vex V5 team’s that each had their own designated programmer, and the programmers all met every couple meetings to learn something new under the seniors. In contrast to the middle school team, the high school had a FRC (First Robotics Competition) team. The stakes were a lot higher and much more competitive than before. Instead of every programmer fending for themselves, in FRC every programmer worked together in order to get the robot moving. It was a shocking change as this time I was working with the enemies. Furthermore, FRC programming offers much more challenges than the simple code in Vex. I had to do outside research and scavenge online forums in the hopes of finding code that actually worked. Many hours were spent clicking away while trying to stay awake. It was incredibly frustrating to spend hours and hours trying to fix an issue that worked mere moments ago, but the relief and sense of accomplishment of finding a solution was definitely worth it. 

During the pandemic the high school team abandoned FRC in favor of creating an inhouse competition that we could do from home. We had to design and build our own products and finally pitch it to the rest of the team. My team was called “AquaHumzah” in honor of another student in the robotics team. I want to clarify, he is still very much alive. The name was a tribute to his first name which was Humzah, and the “aqua” came from our product, which was a scale that determines the amount of water in a water bottle. During my time working for AquaHumzah Inc., I took on a new responsibility helping with the design of the product, rather than the programming. We were lucky enough to have the senior programmer on our team, so we decided to leave the programming to him. I attended many meetings where we spitballed ideas of how our product would work and what it would look like, it felt more like a business pitch than a school club meeting. To complicate matters more, this all happened through zoom. Having to fix technical difficulties of robots while also fixing the technical difficulties of working remotely through zoom, partaking in the robotics club through COVID was a very unique time. 

Despite the changes that occurred throughout the pandemic and within the robotics club, it was one component of my life that stayed stable. I continued to look forward to our bi-weekly meetings even when they were on zoom. Although changes and unknowns were happening all around us at the time, coming together to build a robot was a source of stability that allowed me to persevere throughout COVID. I will never forget how rewarding it was when we had our first meeting back together in person post-pandemic where I finally got to see the most complex robot I ever helped build in action, in real-life, rather than through my screen.