Personal Narrative: The Robotics Team

Playing a sport or being part of a club is a major part of the lives of many students at Nashoba. For me, it's the robotics team. I started when I was a 6th grader at Hale Middle School with the team there and I've programmed robots ever since. Every year up until now, I've worked with other people in doing this. This year was different. The main programmer for the team, Colin Willoughby, had graduated the previous year, leaving me as the only programmer. While there were a few mentors that could help with programming, and a few younger kids that could help as well, As the robotics build season started, I was sure that I could handle it by myself. On top of the normal work that I expected, Mr. Fordiani tasked me with something that I thought would be fairly simple: as a first for Nashoba's team, I was going to design a vision tracking system that would allow the robot to shoot a ball into a small goal from up to twenty feet away. As the six weeks of build season began to pass, I realized that the key word in that last sentence was "thought." The work began building up on other parts of the robot and I became stuck up with details on the vision system so that I had very little idea how to move forward. Despite this, I kept on trying by …show more content…
The second thing he did was ask me what I thought a good next step would be. I realized that this might not be a task that I could complete by myself while still programming the rest of the robot. We went to the rest of the team and asked two other younger team members, Nathaniel and Ben, to help. They were a bit hesitant, since they didn't have much skill at programming, but I knew that if I taught them to do some programming and helped them accomplish some of the less computer-oriented parts of the project, the team could then have both a functional robot and a successful vision