By Natalie Koch

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Excelling in both Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) and outreached programs, the For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) Robotics team competed in the annual FIRST Robotics competition on March 27 and 28 at the Stan Sheriff Center. The club prepared for the competition with a rigorous six-week period beginning in January to design their robot.

“Robotics makes you really have to think, especially (being) part of either the electrical or mechanical teams, you have to be able to problem solve a lot because with the six week time constraints, you have to finish your robot basically in that six weeks and if there’s troubles that you couldn’t foresee then that could be really detrimental,” explained Junior Kayli Chun.

The FIRST Robotics club is divided into four different sub-teams that each have their own specific role in order to construct a successful robot. “There’s business, where they design and write grants and sponsorship stuff, electrical where we wire and program the robot, mechanical, which designs and fabricates the robot and systems integration which is supposed to connect all the sub-teams together,” said Chun.

Regardless of being divided into different teams, all of the members were expected to put in hours to construct the robot. “We will set a schedule with ‘x’ amount of hours, this year we had a little over 40 hours a week that I was here in the shop, but the students are required only about 20 hours a week. We have some students who will come for more than that mostly out of desire to just participate and be involved and contribute,” said FIRST Robotics adviser Tyson Kikugawa.

Each FIRST Robotics team is given the prompt for the competition in January and are given six weeks to build their robot adhering to the given criteria. “They have a kickoff place where you go and watch (a) video so it just like kind of gives you the field dimensions and all of that and your objective to score points,” said Junior Rachel Yasunaga.

This year’s game centered around the idea of stacking objects. “The objective of the game was to put totes on top of each other and you had the option of putting a recycling bin but we just decided to focus on totes and just like picking it up and stacking it on top of each other. So it was just like a simple hook,” said Yasunaga.

The FIRST Robotics club spans internationally, so the turnout of teams at the competition was vast, including 36 teams in all. “There’s definitely around the state, there’s a few off-island teams from Kauai, Maui and a few from Big Island, there’s also the ones here,” said Chun. “There was a California team, a New Jersey team, we had teams from China, Taiwan, Mexico, Canada and Japan.”

The competition was intense but nonetheless, MHS ranked 17th out of the total 36 teams. “We didn’t get into the quarterfinals or one of the eight alliances but we were the backup team cause we were the highest seeded team after that,” stated Chun. “Based on the rankings, and what we saw, (we were) probably the strongest team that wasn’t picked. So it was a little disappointing in that sense but you know we did what we set out to do,” added Kikugawa.

With another competition behind the club, its members can now focus their attention on their next strong suit: outreach programs. “We do outreach to demonstrate the robot and advertise STEM and FIRST and also we kind of plan for next year and we’re in charge of Relay for Life this year so we’re planning that,” said Chun. “It’s not (totally) robotics-based, it’s like kind of robotics slash community service,” added Yasunaga. “They kind of want us to spread it out through the community to younger students just to like make sure they know that they have the opportunity to get the values of STEM and all that.”

Despite the mental exhaustion that inevitably comes from constructing a robot from scratch, the students were able to apply their textbook knowledge to their work through hands on experience. “I really like robotics because I can learn skills that I wouldn’t be able to learn in any other environment. Like I know how to weld, which is not usually something you learn as a high school student. And even programming and wiring, even though there’s classes for that here it’s a lot more intense in robotics so you get more hands on experience with it,” said Chun.

The FIRST Robotics team continues to organize outreach programs in order to expose children of all ages to the benefits of STEM.