Low expectations

Last summer, the robotics coaches announced that there would not be a robotics season. It was difficult to have students in-person to build while still following CDC guidelines. As the year grew closer and robotics applications were open for submission, the plans for the season changed.

A normal robotics season includes designing, building, and programming a robot for a certain game. The game for the Vex competition changes every year. Teams compete in a bracket system to advance to the finals and qualify for Vex Worlds. Teams can also qualify with other awards, like the Design Award which needs a fantastic notebook that teams use to track their progress throughout the season. 

This year, instead of building robots to compete in Vex competitions that would occur during a regular season, the teams would complete online challenges. These online challenges are run by either the Robotics Education Competition Foundation (REC) or companies like Google and Texas Instruments. Many members were not prepared for such a drastically different season, but it was better than nothing. 

“I didn’t have that many expectations knowing that the robotics season was canceled starting from the summer,” Saha said. “I didn’t really expect that we would be able to build robots. Mostly all of 2020 was online, so I had very minimum expectations. I didn’t even know that there were online challenges that we could do. I thought it was going to be a pretty mundane season, but that soon changed.”

Even Romeo was concerned about how the season would go. Not only were students missing out on building robots, but they also had to deal with the new stresses of remote learning.

“This season, my expectations were honestly pretty low,” Romeo said. “I know students were struggling a lot to begin with, learning how to do e-learning. I know that a lot of kids, specifically for robotics, were really disappointed that they wouldn’t be able to build the robots.”

Despite the unusual season, 8995E made the best of what they had. 

“I was expecting for us to start building, but of course with COVID-19, we can’t build,” Parikh said. “That’s completely fine. I still believe the season we had this year excelled beyond my expectations. I love working with our team.”

Without the Vex competitions, the team was able to focus on working together and establishing their dynamic. 

“[My expectations] changed drastically while moving into the season,” Sharma said. “We all got to know each other a lot better. We all got to start working as a team a lot better, we were collaborating a lot better, and overall, we started clicking more and more.”

Unfortunately, many seniors decided to opt out of the season because they would not be able to build. The substitute team building and online challenges were not what they were looking forward to for their final season. However, this allowed the club to take more lowerclassmen. 

“All the seniors kind of dropped out and didn’t want to participate anymore because they weren’t going to be able to build a robot,” Romeo said. “So that really opened up the door where we had a lot of freshmen on the team this year, which was kind of nice because I think they were ambitious.”