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On a Wednesday afternoon, dozens of students gathered in room J-1, home base for Team 100, Woodside High School’s robotics competitors. With safety goggles on and tools in their hands, students were focused on preparing for the CalGames competition coming up in a few days. They had plans to stay on campus perfecting their robot until 9 or 10 p.m.
In the heart of Silicon Valley, many high school robotics teams are raising the future generation of young engineers but some may be surprised to know that the one that started it all was Woodside High School — the inaugural FIRST Robotics Competition team on the West Coast.
“What I love most about our Team 100 Wildhats Robotics team is the way they embody the spirit of gracious professionalism: competing with heart, collaborating with purpose, and lifting one another up as part of an alliance,” said Woodside Principal Karen Van Putten
For 30 years, Woodside High School’s robotics team has been helping aspiring students become not only engineers but also business professionals, marketing experts and graphic designers. Over time, Team 100 has become a space where students from all backgrounds and interests find community while building robots.
Young leaders pave the way
When students join the team, they’re often “thrown into the deep end,” at least that was the experience for Luke Weppner, a junior on Team 100.
When Weppner joined, rookies were given a robot kit and were guided by a team leader on how to build it. Although he was able to gain a wide variety of skills, he said he didn’t feel he had mastered any one skill and wanted to learn more.
Rookies typically begin learning technical skills by getting hands-on experience but the training lacked centralized direction, said sophomore student Kai Montauk.
Seeking to provide rookies with a better experience, Montauk and Weppner took it upon themselves to develop a new training program for new team members that provided more guided support.
“I promised myself that if I could next year, I wanted to make sure that the new rookies not only learned as much as I did, but they had a genuinely fun experience throughout the whole time, and they felt like we cared about them,” said Montauk.
The team fosters a strong pathway for younger students to rise to the top as more senior students graduate over the years. It pushes underclassmen to become leaders, to step up and fill in the roles that are necessary to raise the next class of robotics students, said Team 100 coach Scott Ruth.
Guiding the young team members are a group of retired Intel, Google and Boeing Co. engineers with backgrounds in software, and electrical and mechanical engineering. They dedicate their time to support and mentor students using decades of experience in the field.
Culture of learning
Students are learning how to use professional-grade computer-aided design software, solder metal, code and engineer solutions. If they want to learn something new, mentors never say ‘no,’ the students said.
“I came in with zero experience of anything and they took me in,” said sophomore Lucia Eymann. “They taught me everything.”
While the main skills in robotics are around engineering, coding and building, students are also developing soft skills such as communication, team work, professionalism, leadership and responsibility.
Team 100 coach Ruth said he’s seen students “become more responsible leaders, more confident in themselves, more capable of leading other students.”
Chip Krauskopf has been coaching the team for nearly 10 years and joined through his son, who has since graduated. What’s kept him coming back to the team for almost a decade is the opportunity to witness the exponential growth that students have over their four years of high school, he said.
“To see the kids come in as 14-year-olds and how they mature over the four years and come out leaders at the end is really super exciting,” said Krauskopf. “They take on eagerly, with the optimism of youth, that they can change the world and make it better.”
Mentors also encourage the students to learn from their mistakes and to experiment in order to find the answers to their problems. Unlike other school assignments, the answers to robotics are not at the back of the book, said Krauskopft.
“Nobody walks in here knowing how to build robots. We expect you to make mistakes. We expect you to fail. That’s how we learn,” said Ruth.
Community and wellness
The robotics team spends hours after school together, even into the late hours of the night. Aside from building robots, they spend evenings eating dinner together, weekends working on their robot and go on overnight trips to competitions.
“Robotics has been great for developing friendships. I think it’s a wonderful community for interacting with people with similar interests,” said Montauk. “It’s a great centralization of interest, and it’s this wonderful little niche, just teams all around the world.”
As students spend hours working on their robots, mentors are adamant about setting guidelines around wellness for the team to follow. They also require students to have at least a C in every class in order to participate in the program.
“First is personal health and wellness, second is academics and third is robotics,” said Ruth.
Increasing diversity
While Team 100 has had a number of young women on the team in the past, the number of girls has been trending down, according to Eymann. She joined last year with very little experience but is now serving as the spokesperson for girls and Spanish speakers to join the team.
When Krauskopf began coaching, he said the team was “very male demographically,” lacked students from diverse backgrounds and mostly included students who were pursuing engineering schools.
According to Eymann, the team currently has about five girls of which only two or three of them are active on the team. When she joined, there were about 10 to 15 girls, she said.
“We’re at an all time low, which is not good,” Eymann added. “I’ve had moments where I’ve been like, ‘Oh, I want to quit,’ and then I’m like, but then that’s one less girl, and then a bunch of other girls would never want to join.”
Krauskopf said although they currently have one female mentor, it has been difficult recruiting female engineers.
Eymann is also fluent in Spanish and noticed the lack of Spanish speakers on the team. Although she has attempted to recruit Spanish speakers, she said she has been unsuccessful.
“(I’m trying to) be a voice for people who don’t speak English, who would be interested in joining, because I think it’s a very good opportunity for everybody,” she said. “I think if they speak Spanish and don’t understand English, they might have less opportunities and robotics can open opportunities for them.”
While Eymann ambitiously recruits more people of diverse backgrounds to join the team, leaders are recognizing that more needs to be done.
“Ultimately, we want our team to look like our high school. We’re not there yet, but we hope to continue to make changes and I think we’re better,” said Krauskopf. “We have more female representation, we have some more minority representation than we had in past years, but we still have a ways to go in both those areas.”
