Sophomores Reshape Robotics Team Dynamics
Robotics has recently exploded in popularity among Athenian students, particularly within the class of ’27. This year, sophomores make up the vast majority of the team. At first glance, the reasons behind this sophomore takeover aren’t immediately clear, but a closer look past surface level reveals many secrets of the team.
The makeup of this year's robotics team is an anomaly, even among the almost 25 years the robotics team has run, Co-robotics Director Dave Otten acknowledges the outlying nature of this year’s team: “I've been an unofficial mentor to the team since 2004 so I've seen many iterations of the robotics team. Usually, it skews more toward more seniors. The largest contingent would be seniors, and then under that would be a little bit less juniors, and under that a little bit less sophomores and so on. That's more of a common distribution. And this year's definitely an outlier in terms of distributions,” Dave said.
Sophomore Jackson Ambrose said, “[The sophomores] were basically the robotics team’s last hope, because during the quarantine recruiting really slowed down and the team was really small, which left a bunch of spots open, so a bunch of us [sophomores] joined, and now a lot of the freshman are also joining.”
A similar perspective was presented by William Nie, a senior in robotics. “One of the reasons was because last year the seniors were doing most of the work and they were taking up all of the leadership roles, but when they left a lot of leadership roles opened, which the sophomores filled. Another reason is that, from what I experienced in robotics, the seniors from last year were less STEM focused than maybe the classes are now,” William said.
Another opinion is presented by Dave. “This happens from year to year over the time that I've been robotics director. We've seen the population wane and grow, depending on the interest of incoming classes. Last year, we happened to have a pretty big crew that came who were all really into robotics, and they had done it in middle school, and so we had kind of a bump coming through that. The outgoing class of seniors last year was also quite large, and for whatever reason, there were just not that many folks in the class beneath that who were into it. It's just kind of a personal interest thing we see, we see the same thing on sports teams and theater. It just depends on the personal interests of the group of students coming in.”
The current seniors on the robotics team are not letting this sudden surge of new members go to waste. “Among other things, we started mentor groups. Which are groups completely separate from your sub-group. The hope is that we can understand what's enjoyable [about robotics] and what’s not, and also pass on some of the skills that weren’t taught last year as much,” William said.
This sudden uptrend in recruitment might not just be an anomaly. “The seniors will always take on more responsibility when it comes to the team and will usually be building the robot almost by themselves, and that’s a bad thing because instead of mentoring the new recruits all of their skills are kind of lost which ultimately is a bad thing for the team. The mentor groups are also a way we’ve been working to break this cycle,” William said.
Recruitment is not the only thing going up; the number of consistent robotics members is as well. “We've gone from losing a fairly large percentage of folks who sign up at the beginning of the year at the club fair, which happens every year. We’ll have a lot of folks sign up initially, and then fewer and fewer people show up. But this year we've had much less attrition, especially with girls, I think we went down from around 70% attrition last year, and this year we had only 15%,” Dave said.
This mentorship and rebuilding process of the robotics team is not slowing it down. “We've already sped up the timeline from last year by almost two times. Last year it took us about six or seven weeks to code the robot. We’re only in the third week, and I'd say we're at least 80% done,” Jackson Ambrose said.
A large number of lower classmen being robotics leaders seems like a bad thing due to lack of experience, but this might also be a blessing in disguise. “The downside of that is they maybe don't have as much experience as a senior who's been doing this for three years. The upside of it is that we now have a continuity in leadership from year to year that we haven't had in the past. This year, half of the leadership is 10th graders, which means, if they continue with robotics, we're going to have a very continuous leadership all the way through this year and the next two after that, and there's huge value to that. Because usually, every year you're often feeling like you're reinventing the wheel. These folks will not be doing that,” Dave said.
