Robotics Wins Inspire Award
“You don't have to spend all your time here, but most of us end up doing things because there's a lot of things to be done and doing those things requires time,” Tan said.
After months of hard work and preparation, Exeter’s VERTEX Robotics team won the Inspire Award at the New Hampshire First Tech Challenge and will be advancing to the world championship tournament.
The First Tech Challenge is a competition designed for teams of students from grades 7–12 tasked to design, build, program and operate robots to compete in various challenges.
Upper and programming captain of Exeter’s First Tech Challenge team Penny Brant separated the competition into two parts to simplify the task of building the robot. The first stage addressed a specific problem outlined in the First Tech Challenge guidebook: programming the robot so that it would do a specific action. After multiple trials to perfect the design and program their robot, two students represented the team in controlling the robot to complete a certain task.
According to prep and team member Celine Tan, there are many roles that are involved in executing the first task. “The mechanical [part of the team] came up with the design and executed it [while the] programmers programed the robot and computer-aided design acted as a support,” she said. In this complex process, the prep emphasized that everyone’s role on the team was essential in their success.
The second part of building the robot was based on community outreach. “We refocused our platform to be centered on the gap between technology and especially women in the surrounding communities around Exeter,” Brant said.
Director of Communications and upper Summer Hua elaborated on what set Exeter’s VERTEX robotics team apart. “I think one thing that stood out to the judges was that we were the only high-ranking team that was half ‘rookie’ … half of our team members hadn’t even done robotics before,” she said. “Half of our team members are also female or non-binary and we also have many international students.”
Although their efforts were met with incredible success in this competition, Exeter’s Robotics team has not always won. According to Brant, at the first competition they attended, Exeter ranked quite low. “The robotics team has failed before, but what we learned was that when you don’t succeed, you keep on going,” she said. “It was a very important lesson to learn.”
Prior to the competition, members of the team spent a considerable amount of time preparing for the competition. “We have meetings every Wednesday, Friday, Saturday in addition to all club meetings,” Mechanical Captain Vincent Xiao said. “We have a lot of hardworking members, some of whom pulled two all nighters before the New Hampshire First Tech Challenge.”
In these meetings, they assigned positions for the members in the club, all of whom have a similar amount of power. “It’s interesting because our team doesn’t function under one leader, every team has the same amount of power—no one has more power than anyone else; no one has the power to admit a member or expel a member,” Xiao said.
While they tried their best during every meeting, the Robotics team members struggled to make time to work on their robot with their busy schedules. “Other teams spend forty or fifty hours on these robots,” Xiao said. “So everyone was really busy and spent a lot of time these last few weeks.” Xiao himself spent fifty hours per week over Winter break working on Exeter’s robot.
Tan attributes the stress of building the robot with limited time as the reason why the robotics team is so tight-knit. “I think one of our biggest challenges was stress: everyone became [closer] as the competition got [nearer], but I think that definitely helped our work ethic and how we communicate with each other,” she said.
Outside of competing, a hallmark of the robotics team is the amount of passion each member has for the club. “You don't have to spend all your time here, but most of us end up doing things because there's a lot of things to be done and doing those things requires time,” Tan said.
Despite the long hours, Exonians are drawn again and again to the Robotics team because of the strong team dynamic. “It’s about the teamwork, and the satisfaction when something you built works,” programmer and lower Stephen Gao said. “The bond between team members is pretty deep; it feels like a family.”