“My first robotics competition was very, very badly organized.

Usually, competitions will be 30 minutes behind schedule, but this one was hours behind. It was really, really bad, and it was super packed with people. I thought it was normal, but apparently not. Regardless, I thought [the competition] was really cool, even though I didn’t really understand anything yet.

I first joined Robotics after I heard about it from a friend I knew. My team name is Beanbotics, and I do programming and manage the engineering notebook.

An engineering notebook is where we put in our whole design process from the beginning to the end. There’s a subsystem for intake, to take in rings during competition and for hang, which is the ability for the robot to climb or hang on a ladder – they’re basically different parts of the robot.

Beanbotics competes in Vex, and Impact, which is our team at Bellaire, only does the For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology Robotics Competition. Vex and FRC have different-sized robots. Vex is a lot smaller. I could carry the robot, but for FRC, you need a cart.

They also have different games. This year the VEX game is called high stakes, and it has robots stack plastic rings on stakes. The FRC game is Reefscape and [the robots] put tubes and balls on poles that look like coral in a reef.

After every competition, we rebuild the bot so we can see what we need to improve because when you’re building and driving at home, it’s different from competing.

Competitions use brackets. There [are] semi-finals, quarterfinals, etc. It’s also teamwork. It’s not one team versus another team, it’s alliances of two teams competing and working together.

Competitions can be stressful, but my favorite part about robotics is traveling. Last year, at [the VEX Robotics World Championship], we got to travel and see so many teams and people. There [were] about 800 teams, lots of influential ones from all over the world.

I’m pretty proud of us this year because we’re a lot more prepared and organized. I feel like when we build, we have better reasons. We won’t just build something the day before, and we’re working on the notebook a lot more too. We really want to get underclassmen to join robotics and a really dedicated notebook member next year.

I want to be the programming lead in the future. I also want to get to Dome, which is where the top 16 teams sit at Worlds. I want to develop impressive skills to make the meta and be in the teams that are known for making the first [subsystems].

Most importantly, I want to be an influential team that makes the robotics game different.”