2016 Fall Newsletter
Welcome to the Gatorbotics newsletter! We are excited to share news of our team with you, whether you are a sponsor, a former mentor, a current parent, or just a general fan of our team. Keep an eye out for more newsletters from us, particularly as we head into build and competition season in January.
Go Gators!
CalGames 2016
From October 7 to October 8, Castilleja Gatorbotics participated in the 2016 Cal Games at Fremont High School. The team’s main goal was to expose new members to the many different facets of a robotics competition, such as the large scale of robotics competitions and the different robot designs, according to Gatorbotics lead Katherine Greatwood ’17.
According to Greatwood, the team managed to gel immediately and work with efficiency throughout the two day event.
“Cal Games was a lot of fun this year…,” Greatwood said. “With a brand new leads team who’s never gone through a competition before, everything ran so smoothly,” Greatwood said. “I was really happy with the leads especially and with everyone that was there for cooperating and listening.”
Greatwood also noted that the 2016 Cal Games was a competition of many firsts, including a completely new leads team and the incorporation of new members into the driving team.
“We tried something new, which was having a new person drive for each match,” Greatwood said. “We just wanted to open it up for the whole team. Cal Games is kind of the beginning of that, and I think it was a lot of fun for a lot of people. A lot of people got to drive that have never touched the controls before, and I really liked that.”
Gatorbotics members Olivia Danner ’20 and Lauren Traum ’19 were two of several new members that attended Cal Games and were able to partake in the driving team. Danner was a human player, while Traum was a driver. Although both agreed that participating in the matches was slightly stressful, they thoroughly enjoyed being immersed in the competition.
“It’s really incredible,” said Traum. “I just have never seen so many robots and so many people working on robots in one place or people cheering on the robots like it was a sports game. It completely caught me off guard. It was really cool how spirited the whole event was.”
Traum was also grateful for the lengths the returning members of Gatorbotics went through in order to integrate the new members into the team and help accustom them to the robotics culture.
“The older members of the team are so helpful,” said Traum. “Just the fact that they go to Cal Games and work all day at Cal Games for the newbies to learn how to handle the robot and learn what a competition is like is really incredible.”
After getting a glimpse of Gatorbotics, both Traum and Danner are excited for the upcoming robotics season.
“I got to see the whole playing field and get a feel for how crazy it’s gonna be and how many robots there’s going to be…,” said Danner. “I’m excited to do a competition with the robot that we get to build [in the future].”
Meet this Year's Leads!
Katherine Greatwood: Team Captain
Katherine Greatwood is the Gatorbotics team captain. She is a senior and has been a part of Gatorbotics for four years, and did robotics in middle school. She is most excited about having so many new members this season because it makes everyone more enthusiastic. Gatorbotics increased new enrollment from 4 new members last year to 21 this season. Although Katherine says the biggest challenge so far is keeping track of 41 members and making sure everyone is aware of what is going on, she is excited that so many people are interested in STEM. The most interesting thing she has learned from Gatorbotics is that engineering is cool! Without robotics, she would not have discovered her passion for mechanical engineering – in fact, she plans to major in mechanical engineering in college. Katherine likes the idea that what she has learned a lot over the past three years, she can now teach people who don’t have as much experience. Because she has just gone through the “I don’t know anything” years, it is easier to explain concepts to people. Seeing the connections build across the whole team is the best part for her.
This season, the goals for the team are to get everyone really involved because the team is almost entirely student led. Preparing the technical team to begin the season with more background knowledge is important for maximum efficiency and engagement. It’s also important that everyone feels comfortable in the lab, so everyone can get the most out of the season. Katherine also wants to get everyone comfortable with computer aided design (CAD), which is 3D modeling on a computer. She thinks it's a valuable tool because it is widely used in the engineering world.
Kathleen Mhatre: Mechanical Co-Lead
Senior Kathleen Mhatre is co-leading the build team in her 3rd year of Gatorbotics. She is looking forward to building an awesome robot this season, and getting to see what Gatorbotics comes up with. This season, Kathleen says the biggest challenge she will face is finding members who will devote their time to the team. The most interesting thing she has learned doing Gatorbotics is pneumatics – there are so many pieces! This season she wanted to be lead because she found that last season, the more you contributed, the more rewarding the experience was. Kathleen says the coolest things about Gatorbotics are prototyping, designing, and building. A fun fact about Kathleen: she has 3 younger brothers; Brian, Adam, and David, the three make up the BAD brothers. Kathleen compares her sense of humor to “an eleven year old boy’s.”
Arushi Gupta: Mechanical Co-Lead
Arushi Gupta, a mechanical co-lead, is a junior and has been in Gatorbotics for three years. She is excited to meet the new members of the team! It’s her first year doing mechanics, and she thinks that the coolest thing about mechanics is the difference between the concepts about how parts will interact and how they interact in real life. The most interesting thing Gatorbotics has taught her is that you need to mess up many times before you find something that works. A fun fact about Arushi: She lived in India for seven years.
Christine Cho: Programming and Electronics Lead
Senior Christine Cho is the Programming and Electronics lead. This season she is excited to take on a new challenge and meet new members of the team. The biggest challenge she has faced this season is encouraging everyone to attend workshops; she hopes that by the beginning of the season everyone will have the skills to contribute to the team. The most interesting thing she has learned from Gatorbotics is computer science. She hopes to be a role model for younger students as older students were role models for her since she joined the team her freshman year. The coolest thing about Programming is that everyone is passionate and excited to learn. One fun fact about Christine: She plays golf!
Ria Sonecha: Community Outreach and Strategy & Scouting Lead
Ria Sonecha, a junior at Castilleja, is the Gatorbotics lead of community outreach and co-lead of strategy and scouting. She is really excited to get to know the new members and lead new outreach programs. Gatorbotics is trying to create a First Lego League team at Building Futures Now, and working with the younger kids is lots of fun. When she joined robotics in freshman year, Ria was not very interested in engineering, but she later learned that she really enjoys STEM. As an outreach lead, she wants to give back to the team and help younger members the way past leads have helped her. In addition to Gatorbotics, she plays water polo and used to do Indian folk dance. She loves working with the young girls at a local low-income elementary school. Fun fact: She can wiggle her right ear!
Katie Mishra: Research & Development and Strategy & Scouting Lead
Katie Mishra is the Scouting and Strategy lead and the Research and Development lead this season. She loved going to the FIRST Championships last season and spending time with the team. The biggest challenge she’s faced this season is the increased time commitment, but finds the sacrifices are worth the time. She is very interested in coding and how a short code can direct a robot’s motion. Gatorbotics fostered her love of engineering. She is fascinated by vision tracking, which allows the robot to shoot at a target automatically. According to Katie, at Gatorbotics everyone feels so welcome and learns so much. A fun fact about Katie: She is obsessed with corgis!
Aditi Satyavrath: Entrepreneurship Lead
Aditi Satyavrath, a member since her freshman year, is now a senior at Castilleja and leads the Entrepreneurship team. Entrepreneurship is starting a lot of really interesting initiatives and she is really excited to see where they go. She aims to leave new members a good foundation for next year. Due to past challenges concerning communication with sponsors, Aditi is leading the effort to foster longer lasting relationships.
She thinks we are very much like a tech company; what you see on the outside is the hardware and technology. But she thinks what she has learned is what happens behind the scenes is just as important. Aditi enjoys communicating with local sponsors and local businesses as it allows her to understand more of the “behind-the-scenes” aspects of startups. As a student at an all-girls school, Aditi believes that it’s important to bring more girls into STEM field and hopes that her role as the entrepreneurship lead will inspire girls to do so. Fun fact: she is obsessed with sloths and plays the piano.
Pre-season Worskhops
The Gatorbotics team prepared for the season by attending build, programming, and entrepreneurship workshops.
In the Kickoff Workshop, team members watched a video of the 2014 competition. Members set up data like they would build the 2014 robot by predicting the time required to shoot a ball into the basket and the likeliness of the ball landing in the basket.
In the Safety Workshop, members received a checklist of items in the Bourn Lab and became acquainted with the items and how to use them safely and effectively. Members created an iPhone stand by using various equipment in the lab such as the band saw and drill press; this project allowed members to apply what they learned about the Bourn Lab tools.
New members also attended either the Intro to Build or Intro to Programming workshops to learn the basics of the sub team. Additionally, the Calculus and Controls workshop was also a required prerequisite.
“During the Calculus and Controls workshop, we learned about two types of controls: Bang Bang and PID,” Lauren Byunn-Rieder ’20 said. “Bang Bang is essentially going towards your destination at full speed and once you get there [you] stop, if you overshoot, [you] go back at full speed. PID stands for proportional integral derivative, and essentially it's a calculation to say ‘go fast,’ if you're far away but ‘slow down,’ as you get closer, so you don't overshoot.”
“From this workshop, I learned a different way of thinking about how to make a robot move, which will be helpful in the season,” Byunn-Rieder added.
The workshops served as a helpful review for returning members, but more importantly, they accelerated new members to have a similar toolkit of knowledge as the experienced members. The workshops laid a solid foundation for the official start of the season in February.
First Lego League
Gatorbotics also sponsors First Lego League (FLL) teams for middle school students interested in robotics. This year’s First Lego League “Animal Allies” Challenge focuses on how to improve interactions between humans and animals through the use of Lego Mindstorms to solve specific missions. Five teams of enthusiastic middle schoolers are currently working on this challenge, identifying problems that arise when people and animals interact and then designing solutions to improve these interactions. Mr. Cortella, a middle school math teacher at Castilleja, mentors these groups during their meetings three times each week.
