2017 Spring Newsletter
The build season ended in the second week of February. As Gatorbotics prepares for competition season, we are so excited to share with you some features of leads, mentors, and coaches and an update about our outreach program with the new First Lego League team at Building Futures Now. Thank you for your support!
Meet the Leads (Pt. 2)!
Kathleen Mhatre: Mechanical Co-Lead
Kathleen started the season hoping to make sure everyone felt that they were contributing and to build a functioning robot. She is definitely making progress with this goal; she said that “people learned a lot this year and got a lot of good experience.” The robot does two of the three things it needs to do, which is great, but Kathleen is ready to make improvements on the robot before competitions start. She said that in order to accomplish the team's goals, the build team became much more familiar with CAD and the mill this season. The increased use of these tools came with a learning curve; she said “you don't just go from no knowledge to doing it 100% correct. There's a lot especially about CAD that we didn't and still don't know. Learning how to use CAD to our greatest advantage will take time but is a process we started this year.” While accomplishing her goal for the season was harder than she anticipated, Kathleen said that “every day we face problems we didn't anticipate, so it was difficult, but I think that's a good thing.”
Aditi Satyavrath: Entrepreneurship Lead
Aditi’s main goal for this season was to form better connections between the Gatorbotics team and our community, through other ways besides sponsorship. She says that the Entrepreneurship team has taken huge steps to achieve this goal in the 2016-2017 year, but it may take a couple of years to solidify their relationships with new sponsors and mentors. She explains that the newsletter initiative and the remaking of the Gatorbotics website are both actions which are geared towards engaging the community in Gatorbotics throughout the year.
Ria Sonecha: Community Outreach Lead and Co-Lead of Strategy and Scouting
Ria’s first goal was to strategically decide the robot's priorities so that the team could build a robot that will perform well at competitions. Ria explains that having a plan for the points analysis and using that to determine the robot's priorities really helped them think about their approach to the challenge critically and ensure that we were making conscious decisions about the robot's functions. Her second goal was to ensure that all members (new and returning) feel that they made a significant contribution to the robot, really understand how it works, and learned something this season. She says that having lots of pre-season workshops made it so that all members had a solid foundation. Ria also explains that the fact that the team worked on two robots allowed everyone to have a job and work on something if they wished to. She says one of the biggest challenges was having the time to test all of the mechanisms and perfect them before ship. The team still has some work to do before competition, but she thinks they are in a good place now. Ria believes it was easier than she had anticipated to make two robots. She was worried that they wouldn't have enough time to finish, but it ended up not being a big issue.
Arushi Gupta: Mechanical Co-Lead
Arushi’s goal for this season was to build a robot the entire team was proud of, and one that everyone felt they contributed to and understood. She also hoped to learn more technical skills personally as well as improve the collective knowledge of the team. Throughout the season, she says she was continuously surprised by the level of knowledge of new members and their enthusiasm to learn and do more. When comparing their comfort with using tools and sharing ideas during workshops to their contributions in the last few weeks, she says she definitely saw a difference. Arushi expresses that the biggest change this year was the number of required workshops and other requirements to join the team. Her hope was that members would be better prepared for the season and feel ready to jump in. During the season itself, she tried to give new members as many opportunities as possible to work on that day's task and allow them to learn by doing, as she has been lucky enough to do over the past two years. Arushi says that trying to keep every member of team engaged, especially as they reached the end of the season was difficult, as there weren't always enough tasks for everyone. Before the season, she was apprehensive about the daunting task of designing and building a robot in six weeks, and making sure everyone was learning and enjoying themselves while we did it. However, she says that the incredibly capable and kind people on the team, as well as our mentors, made it much easier to work through the six weeks one day and one decision at a time.
Katie Mishra: Co-Lead of Strategy and Scouting
Katie's goal for the build season was to incorporate a working vision system into the robot, and to foster a cohesive environment for the programming team. She was successful in both goals; although the vision system has a few remaining bugs, it is completed for the most part. The programming team has bonded really fast, due to its small size, and they have had lots of fun together. To realize her goals, she and the programming team broke up the programming for the vision system into many steps; she says, “First, we worked on the basic math of driving forward, turning to an angle, and driving to a peg. Many steps turned out to more complicated than we thought, so we had to go back and rework or tune many aspects…A majority of our time was devoted to testing as there were many variables we had to tune to make vision work properly.” As usual with programming, there were many bugs to combat, but Katie was determined. She said that her goals were easier to accomplish than she expected as creating vision on last year’s robot was a “race post-season and at competitions,” but the increased time they spent on the system paid off and made the process easier.
Outreach With Building Futures Now
As part of the Outreach program, members of Team 1700 have been working with a small group of 8th grade girls at Building Futures Now, an organization that provides education opportunities for students in East Palo Alto. During weekly meetings with the girls at Building Futures Now, Gatorbotics members have been introducing them to the FIRST Lego League competition and teaching them the basics of coding and engineering. Projects over the last several weeks have included building the game pieces for this year's FIRST challenge, "Animal Allies," learning how to program the Lego Mindstorm robot to move in specific sequences, and using sensors to compete tasks. The long-term goal is to help prepare the girls to have a competitive FIRST Lego League team next year.
“It’s been a lot of fun watching the girls engage with the project, work out problems in their code, and help each other understand new concepts,” says Ria Sonecha, one of the Gatorbotics members leading this program. “They seem to be having a lot of fun and it is so inspiring to see how excited they are about learning new things. I hope that this experience will motivate them to continue pursuing STEM both in and out of school.”
Meet the Mentors and Coaches!
Hal Rucker
This year, Gatorbotics welcomed the newest addition to the build coaching team, founder of Neuma Innovations and Battlebots contestant Hal Rucker.
Gatorbotics Entrepreneurship Team (GET): Why did you decide to become a coach for the Gatorbotics team?
Hal Rucker (HR): I have a daughter who started the sixth grade [at Castilleja] this year, and she and I have been building robots since she was six years old. I also have an interest in teaching kids how to build robots.
GET: Can you talk a little bit about what you do outside of coaching Gatorbotics?
HR: I’m a full time inventor. I have a workshop in San Carlos. I come up with ideas for products and I build prototypes of them. Then, I try and sell the ideas. I also, for fun, build robots. I participate in competitions like Battlebots, the TV show. My daughter and I were on the show last season on ABC.
GET: How does your robot-building outside of Castilleja carry over to Gatorbotics?
HR: Being my first season with the team and also keeping in mind that I’ve never been to a First Robotics Competition, I couldn’t help very much with things having to do with first robotics. There was a lot I could help with like giving tips on how to build things, how to do certain things in CAD, and where to buy things that you need for your robot. Gatorbotics really is a student-driven team, so I have to confess that I don’t think I had much to do with the actual design or building of the robot. I just helped with keeping the tools running and giving tips here and there.
GET: Did anything about Gatorbotics that surprised you?
HR: I was a little surprised at how 100% driven they were to do it themselves without any outside help. That was a little frustrating for me, but also extremely impressive that they managed to build the robot that they did without any outside help. I guess I was surprised by how little I helped and how great it turned out without any of my help.
GET: Can you describe your experience as a coach of Gatorbotics?
HR: The biggest thing I learned was to stay out of the way and let them do their thing, while at the same time, keeping my eye open for small teachable moments when I could show somebody how to do something in a slightly different and better way or put alternative ideas out there for them to consider. Ultimately, it was their decision as to whether it was a good decision or not.
Chris Cruise
Gatorbotics mentor, Chris Cruise, has been coaching the Gatorbotics team for two years, and is sadly leaving this summer to start a job in Detroit. Cruise has been a part of robotics clubs since his own high school years and has many fond memories of First Robotics as well as Gatorbotics.
Gatorbotics Entrepreneurship Team (GET) : Why did you decide to become a coach for the Gatorbotics team?
Chris Cruise: A long time ago, I did First Robotics in High School. I’m originally from Florida, so I was on a team in Jacksonville and when I went to college at the University of Florida, I got involved in mentoring a robotics team. I had done four years of mentoring before joining Gatorbotics, so when I moved out to California to do graduate school at Stanford, I was already looking for teams to join up again.
GET: What do you enjoy about coaching the team?
CC: I like coaching because First Robotics and the mentors I had in high school played a big role in getting me interested in engineering and pursuing a clear that ultimately was the field of robotics. Part of it is just trying to pay it back for the mentoring that I got in high school. Day to day, what I like about it is first the very powerful program. It’s probably the hardest high school club to be a part of: to design and build this robot in six weeks is a task that if you took to a engineering company, they would laugh at you because it’s not the time scale they work on, but somehow we manage to do it every year.
GET: What is your favorite thing to do while coaching?
CC: My favorite thing to do while coaching is always trying to challenge the students: always forcing them to evaluate their ideas, come up with new ideas. They think I’m a tough mentor, I guess, because I never let them have anything, [but they are] some of the smartest high schoolers I’ve met so...just forcing them to never accept good enough...can be a point of contention at times...but I find it enjoyable.
GET: Is there anything I haven’t touched upon that you would like me to include?
CC: I’m very happy to have been a part of this team...all of the kids are destined for greatness: the amount of hours and work they put into this is just really incredible. Some of the leads are there 40 or 50 hours a week, and, when I was in high school, I was one of the leaders on my team..., and we were there max 12-16 hours a week. The amount of dedication that some of these students have is really impressive, especially with all the other things [they] have going on.
