Watauga Robotics Focuses on Building Community

Members of the Watauga Robotics Club. Photo Courtesy of Addie Parker and Hadley Woods, Watauga Yearbook

The Watauga Robotics Club is run by a handful of highly driven students who design, build, and program robots to complete certain challenges that are set at the beginning of the robotics season. Beyond building robots, the club also participated in a variety of service opportunities around Boone this year.

Coming out of the pandemic, the Robotics Club struggled to organize, but has come back stronger than ever this season. This year, the club has redistributed the work amongst members and created a strong sense of comraderie among teammates.

“Last year we were still very much recovering from the pandemic; none of us really knew what we were doing and most of the work ended up being done by one or two people,” said senior and club president Kyle Hollars. “As a result, the robot barely worked and a few of us were very stressed and tired. This year, we focused a lot more on distributing the work and making sure the non-senior members were able to contribute.”

Thanks to the reorganization and an emphasis on incorporating new students into the club, the team placed second for the Motivate Award. The award honors a team's culture and involvement in their community. This award is presented to First Tech teams, which is the league for middle through high school students.

“This focus on engaging new students helped us win the 2nd place Motivate Award," said Hollars. "We also had a much better robot design, programming system, and team organization structure because more people were able to contribute their talent and ideas."

At the beginning of each season, the judges for the robotics competitions release the format that tells the teams what the challenges their robot will complete. Junior Aditya Binay is a member of the robotics team and helped build this season's robot.

“In this competition, the judges release the format of the competition at the beginning of the season. For instance, they might tell you to build a robot that can pick up cones and stack them to earn points,” said Binay. “For the rest of the season, we worked towards building and programming a robot that could perform the tasks specified by the judges,”

The Robotics Club participates in a variety of events, like BuildFest and the Spooky Duke 5K, to stay involved in their community and raise money for the club,

“The robotics club does several fun outreach activities each year. My favorite one would be our participation in Build Fest. At this event, we set up activities to help elementary school students learn about and get interested in STEM,” said Binay. “The activities from this year included building with Construx toys, Snap Circuits, and helping kids drive a ring toss robot. This event was very enjoyable to me because I got to interact with elementary school students and saw the delight and smiles on their faces while driving our robot!”