Oak Park High School’s robotics team is not just a place where students can explore their engineering passion, it’s also where they can improve their teamwork and problem-solving skills. Building a robot requires a coder, driver and builder, but most importantly effective communication and teamwork. Like other activities, the team needs to set clear goals for themselves.
“The goal is always to hopefully win a competition, make it to state or maybe even make it to worlds,” lead advisor Allan Prescott said. “The key goal [if you look in the classroom] is they’re all having fun. They have fun at competitions, they work hard. Every year, they’re getting better and developed a pretty good team mentality.”
The process requires everyone on the team to pull their weight. Despite having individual ideas, the team comes together with their own prototypes to add to the robot.
“Although we do have roles, I am the main coder and organizer of parts, Jackson is the main driver plus backup coder,” junior Ricky Radant said. “Derrick is the team captain who also is the main builder, the rest help build.”
Senior team captain Derrick Qin has a strong belief that every person can bring something to the team, it’s just a matter of putting them to work and giving them work to do.
“I originally thought that a leader was being the highest position and you had to control everything, but when I became a leader in 11th grade, I realized I could not handle building the robot, designing parts of the robot with school and test work at the same time,” Qin said. “I learned that you cannot be the best at everything, it’s better to delegate those duties to other people who are better in that department and who also have the time.”
Robotics has taught builders so much more than just how to construct a complex robot, but also about leadership and collaboration. Although it is tough to agree upon an idea, each person has the team’s interest best at heart.
“We had to make some tough decisions about whether to remove certain parts of our robot that we had put a lot of time into,” sophomore Jackson Farhat said. “But we have made those changes and they have worked in our favor.”
With each team having strengths, there are always some challenges they have to overcome.
“Our biggest challenge is probably finding times for everyone to meet,” senior Kirthi Paramasivan said. “The new freshmen all want to try many different activities at the school which we support, but that leaves a limited frame of time in which we can work on our robot.”
The team will always find time to continue to piece their ideas together and reflect on unforgettable moments they share.
“My most memorable moment was when we kept winning games at our last competition which was such a nerve-racking experience because none of our teams have ever made it past the first round of the bracket and we ended up making it to finals,” Farhat said.
With the hopes of bringing back a trophy for the first time since 2002, the team continues to work together and heads into their competitions with confidence, hoping to make it further than last year.
