Haverford has many clubs available to its students. In Robotics, you guessed it, they build robots. What you may not know is that the club is filled with competitiveness, dedication, and, most importantly, fun.
In the Robotics shop, the typical day consists of the construction and design of important elements of the robot.
“Most of the time is spent building your robot, working on the game analysis, or doing some coding,” Robotics Coach Mr. Will Leech said.
Right now the teams are mainly focused on constructing initial designs for their robots.
Robotics is not lacking in competition; in fact, they have their first tournament this November.
“[The competitions] are long days, usually from 8 a.m. to right around 4 or 5 p.m.,” Mr. Leech said. “We have about eight or nine local competitions a year and we also attend Signature Events, which are usually much bigger events [that] involve some sort of overnight trip.”
At these tournaments, students can make final adjustments to their robots and compete in up to ten qualification matches and an elimination bracket at the end.
Every year, the rules and objectives are different for the competitions. However, the design of the competitions share some similarities.
“There is not always one way to score points,” Mr. Leech said. “Sometimes, you can score points by scoring a goal, sometimes you can score points by stacking something on one another, and there is usually something called an End Game for each game, which is something you can do for the last 10 to 15 seconds of a game that allows you to get bonus points.”
The written rules and designs are not the only common elements at these competitions.
“The Robotics community is very consistent on a lot of other important rules such as sportsmanship and making sure that you aren’t cheating by making modifications to your robot that you shouldn’t be making to your robot, and a lot of these rules are consistent year in and year out,” Mr. Leech said.
Within the school’s Robotics team 169, smaller groups of students collectively build a robot. Students often assemble their own teams.
“A lot of that is student choice,” Mr. Leech said. “As coaches, we may direct freshmen teams into certain groups because they may be a little less experienced, and we want to make sure that they are doing better, but a lot of our upperclassmen teams are self-selected, and as long as we as coaches see selection as a sensible choice, we are happy to support the students.”
The Robotics team is lucky to have several coaches. But what role do they play when it comes to making the machines?
“Our jobs are more as facilitators. We generally have this rule that we don’t lay our hands on the tools,” Mr. Leech said. “We don’t do much work on the robot for the students. Sometimes we will pick the robot up and turn it around and look at it, but very rarely are we actually picking up tools and unscrewing stuff for the students.”
The club’s goal is for the students to build, create, and explore the world of Robotics. The role of the coaches is to steer the students in the right direction.
“We are only offering coaching advice, facilitating those ideas, and we are never telling them exactly what to do. Sometimes we’ll suggest ideas or maybe point out things that might not work,” Mr. Leech said.
Robotics is a year-round commitment; however, in the winter, practices happen during the afternoon from 3:15 to 5 p.m. and things heat up. With this commitment comes sports credits.
“Generally if you want one activity credit throughout the entire Robotics season we expect 50% attendance,” Mr. Leech said. “You [also] have the opportunity to get an additional activity credit. This will require you to be a very prominent player in the Robotics world, that means being very present in the shop and attending a lot of those competitions and contributing to the culture of the Robotics team.”
