Every day at school, during lunch, a group of dedicated Gaithersburg High School students meets in a third-floor classroom lined with computers to build and program a robot.
At the beginning of this school year, students ranging in age from 14 to 18 decided it was time for Gaithersburg High to have its own robotics team. With the help of teacher sponsors, two peer mentors and funding from the community and the school, they went from no experience and no material to a functioning, whirring robot in just a couple of months.
Senior Dan Younis, 18, was the driving force behind the formation of the club and he was able to gather a core group of passionate, interested teens. Juniors Alexander Parris, 16, and Gamitha Wijekoon, 16, who are both members of Lockheed Martin’s private robotics team, stepped up and used their experience to mentor the group.
Younis was inspired to start a club at his own school after seeing that other schools around him already had clubs and were competing. Many robots created in such clubs are pitted against each other in the FIRST Robotics Competition. There are state and national levels as well as qualifying rounds.
The Gaithersburg team has participated in two competitions so far — one at the Naval Academy on Jan. 10 and the other the weekend after that at The Bullis School in Potomac. Though they didn’t do very well at the Naval Academy, the team placed second at Bullis.
Younis said watching their team’s name rise up on the board was very exciting.
“If you’re a first-year team, you don’t make it to the top ten,” said junior Dalton Durant, 16.
The team explained that they are using these competitions as learning experiences in order to discover the best techniques for building and tweaking their robot and the best plan of action at the actual event.
“Each round we would change something — keep the design, make small adjustments,” said junior Joshua Bastian, 17.
Though the Gaithersburg High team won’t be going to the state-level competition this year, they have aspirations for the future.
Next year, Younis said the plan is to “build more robots.” He said the team wants to recruit more people and build multiple robots in smaller groups within the club, then pick the best one to represent the school and work on it together.
“The more lotto tickets you buy, the better chance you have at winning,” Durant added.
Because the team just dove into building and programming robots with no prior experience, there were a lot of challenges for the members. Younis said he taught himself basic coding to program the robot, and members learn more every day.
Younis said the hardest part is coordinating the two components, building and coding, in order to make a functioning robot.
“There are different people with different skill sets. Dan [Younis] codes, I build,” Parris said.
They also have knowledgeable sponsors pushing them along, said Butch Marshall, the academy of information technology adviser at Gaithersburg High School. Marshall assists them during their meetings and lets the students use his classroom. James Garrant is an outside adviser who also has been giving the team advice and help.
“They’re transferring the skills that they learned in class to the robot,” Marshall said, explaining that many of the students are in the academy of information technology program at the school.
Overall the students seemed to agree they got where they are today through dedication and hard work. Durant explained that the club meets every day at lunch time and after school. Bastian said he brought the robot home over winter break to work on it and had club members over to work with him even during their time off.
“A basic design won’t win you a competition. What will win is teamwork and strategy,” Durant said.
Durant said the group really just wants more people to hear that there is a robotics club in the school.
“There are people who want to do it, but don’t know it exists,” Durant said.