Students of robotics say that their club may not be the most liked in the school. They tell stories of minor incidents that have gone down at the intersection of B and C halls. The robots they build cost thousands of dollars. While they spend a lot, the Robotics Club also spends time to create a love of robots in young kids of the HSE district.

“We want to have little kids to feel what it’s like to drive a robot around,” sophomore Gavin Powell said. “They get a feel for it and have fun.”

On their trips out to schools, they bring along their STEM Bot. Its purpose is to help the young ones discover robots and they were preparing for a trip to Brooks School Elementary.

“The robot is a few years old,” Powell said. “It was an old competition robot, but now it has a camera on it so the kids get to drive the robot around a course real fast by looking at a screen.”

When they are not working on growing the club, they are putting in work hours on their competition bot. Their upcoming competition is Deep Space. For this competition, their robot will have to do specific tasks.

“We have an intake on the robot that will take in a ball,” freshman Fatih Atlamaz said. “The ball will go up a climb, then the robot shoots the ball, and we have to get the ball into a hole to earn points.”

The team has two robots for this competition. One is the actual contest robot while the other is used as a practice bot. They test the practice bot and make necessary changes to the competition bot, allowing the competition robot to stay in prime condition.

“The test robot has a few slight changes from the competition bot,” Atlamaz said. “If something goes wrong, we can change it.”

The rules for the competition dictate when the club cannot touch their robot anymore. With that deadline coming this week, the team has confidence in their machine.

“We have a week left until we can’t touch it anymore,” Atlamaz said. “It’s doing pretty well. We only have a few slight changes left.”