Denali students build engineering and teamwork skills through robotics

Silicon Valley is a technological hub housing some of the largest companies from around the world, including Google, Facebook, and Apple. Summit Denali’s Robotics Club builds off of the technological drive in the valley, and gives students a place where they can build and practice their engineering abilities.

The club gives students the chance to work with computer software and physical tools depending on what they would like to focus on. It is a student run club that is overseen by Summit Denali parent Heather Chen.

“I just enjoy being here,” Vice President of the club and junior Andrew Lee said when asked what his favorite part of the club is. Although Lee doesn’t participate in as much hands-on preparation as other members, he says that “it’s really goofy, we do fun things, we build robots. It’s all good.”

“It’s fun to experience the engineering process,” freshman Skyler Sauer said. While they brainstorm together during the season, members are able to design and create their own inventions using the design process during the off-season. One of these inventions is a rubber band launcher.

The club has a love-hate relationship with the testing stage of the engineering process. “When it works, it’s great,” Sauer said. “But it never does. It never works.” Junior Leopold Chen agrees with this statement, adding that something always goes wrong.

“We use chromebooks all the time, and I don’t think we fully experience physically working with our hands,” Sauer said. He believes that the club is an important way for students at Denali to experience a physical application of science.

The club has helped many of these students personally improve. Decision making, cooperation, and time management are just a few of the skills these students recognize as their largest assets. They’ve practiced and built theses skills over the year.

The culture that has developed in the club allows the group to bond and grow together. “It’s a lot less physical than sports, but there’s still a lot of teamwork required because everyone has their own ideas,” junior Samuel Si said.

The club has many ways of dealing with controversies over building ideas. Oftentimes, they’ll weigh out the pros and the cons, eventually deciding which path would be most beneficial. Other times they’ll test these ideas and see what works.

Their teamwork culminates into the robotics season where the club tests their final robot in a competition against other teams from around the area. The season begins in late August and ends in early January.

The club participated in one competition last year and two competitions this year. However, their journey was not as smooth as they had planned for it to be. “Immediately after the first competition, we realized that our robot wouldn’t work,” Chen said.

The team had about one month before the next competition, leaving them very little time to go through their design and fix any bugs that they had. “It was very short,” Si said. After considering the options, they had to disassemble the robot and rebuild it using the scraps that they had left.

They met several times a week to finish their robot in time. Meetings occurred after school and over the weekends, oftentimes for hours on end. The club calls this “crunch time”.

The team’s hard work paid off. In their second competition, they placed fourth out of 27 teams, but lost in the semifinals. Nonetheless, this was a big improvement from their first competition where they placed eighth out of 16 teams.

“We did incredibly well, and finally made it to semifinals for the first time ever,” Lee said. “Just looking upon the past three years and all the stuff we had to go through to get here. It’s truly a measurable experience about seeing you and your friends go so far after working so hard.”

The club is always looking for new recruits, and encourage students to join even during the off-season. Students who are interested in joining should contact Emily Lam at elam.de@mysummitps.org or Andrew Lee at alee.de@mysummitps.org.

Featured image (at the top of this post): Leopold Chen (junior) tinkers with different materials during a club meeting.