The Robotics Club is an intensive club that centralizes around building robots to compete in tournaments. They are given parameters and specific actions  that the robot must be able to do, before starting to build the robot.

“The Robotics Club is more than just a group of students that put together robots. The Robotics Club has many aspects within it, varying from marketing, electrical, engineering, communications to leadership, to name a few. Because Robotics is so diverse in what it entails, anyone can gain knowledge and experience that you’d normally only be able to obtain in the corporate world,” junior Roman Renazco said.

There is a large division of labor in robotics. Each team is in charge of a specific section of the robot and its parts so that the team can put it together in the short time after they receive the instructions for the robot and the tournament. They have a group that raises the money for the robot by getting sponsors, a programming team that writes the coding for the robot, a mechanical team that assembles it, an electrical team that does the wiring and such within the machine, as well as other smaller teams with more specialized work.

“We take careful measures to ensure the safety of all our members. Everyone has to take safety training and most of our tools require additional training. We take every measure possible to keep everyone really safe,” leader of the safety team, junior Cole Thompson said.

Safety is a top priority within the Robotics Club. No matter how many years anyone has been in the club, each year they have to renew their safety training. They wear proper clothing to make sure they are not harmed while working; safety goggles, jeans and closed toed shoes are a few of the main articles of clothing.

“I love Robotics because many things we do in school are not usually applied to real life situations. Robotics changes that, for example in the programming theme, we use trigonometry for the vision programming for the robot,” senior Charlemagne Wong said.

Most people are able to pick their teams, where they can practice and build on skills they personally deem worth their time. Each member contributes in some way shape or form and is able to improve themselves as they create a robot.

“We have a pretty good team synergy. We work really well. Of course it helps to have a task and a deadline,” Thompson said.

The next tournament that Robotics Club has is at the beginning of 2017. They are given the parameters early into the year, then have a few months to build a robot and enter it into the competition. The competition has a different objective each year, such as being able to pick up and stack boxes or to navigate obstacles.