Extracurriculars; they make High School an amazing time in our lives. With extracurriculars you can make many new friends and have many new experiences. They also can be an incentive to keep your grades up because if they dip too low you can not be in them. One extracurricular activity I have always enjoyed was robotics.
The robotics season starts in early January and ends around May. Though we have a busy pre-season, as we have to teach new people a lot about how the program works and how to do important tasks, we also work on personal projects. One of the personal projects we are eventually going to build is a T-Shirt cannon. The T-Shirt cannon would be able to shoot shirts out of it during our home games and would be a great way to hype people up. These projects also help teach new people and even veterans new things. You constantly learn new things when you are in robotics. I have learned new programming techniques and how to optimize code to make it take less power. Some build teams learn new general building techniques every year. I have also made new friends in our robotics team. Our robotics team mixes with Logansport High School, so I met some people there that share the same interests as me. That is another great thing; it helped me meet some people who had some of the same general interests as me. Robotics also is helping me with my career path. I want to be a computer programmer, so programming for the team improves my skills as a programmer. Being on the team also allowed me to be able to mess with technology that I would never have had access to if I had not been on the team.
We also can compete all over Indiana. This helps me not be stuck in Cass County all the time because it can get pretty bland. One of the competitions we went to was at Lafayette Jeff. Lafayette is a much bigger town than Logansport and was more intriguing. I also can meet people from other teams doing this. During one of last season’s competitions, I had a good chat with one of McCutcheon High School’s programmers about the way he structured his code and the actual robot. I also was able to receive some programming help from another team because I could not figure out how timers worked in Java.
Robotics also has an interesting game structure. Instead of us being by ourselves, we get a randomized match list in the qualifiers. Then we get paired with 2 other random teams, and the enemy team has three random robots called an alliance. If we make qualifiers, the top 8 teams get to choose their alliance. Then they all fight against the other top 8 alliances.
My time in Robotics has been enjoyable, and I believe that it will be enjoyable for anyone that tries it. You do not need any experience programming or building machines to join. You can learn those skills while doing it. If you have any questions about how to join you can ask Mr. Snoeberger or myself.