When the all-girl robotics team at St. Francis High School in Sacramento, Calif. meets to brainstorm solutions, a poster on the wall reminds them: “Engineering is navigating from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm.”

Learning to overcome failure is a lesson the team has learned consistently after years of competing in the annual MATE, an underwater robotics competition, says the school’s robotics coach, Marcus Grindstaff. “It’s important for high school students to learn that having their ideas or designs fail is the first step to improving the idea or design. This couldn’t be more true than when your robot floods the night before competition because someone forgot to tighten the lid,” Grindstaff says. “The best teams come together and tackle the issues together.” 

Indeed, the St. Francis’ team’s ability to tackle issues together has garnered them a world championship finish and placed them in the top five in the world for the past three years.

The Value of Robotics Competitions 

Robotics competitions like MATE and VEX Robotics and high-school robotics programs teach real-world engineering and teamwork. 

“Building a successful robot requires the tight integration of mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and software. In our program, we focus on the engineering process and how to drive the solutions forward. On our robotics team, you will accidentally blow up a circuit board or destroy a waterproof camera or create a wicked software defect — that’s going to happen. And you will live through all of that and be a better engineer as a result,” Grindstaff says.

“Students who have real-world experience in robotics programs can immediately recognize how their studies apply to the real world,” Grindstaff says. “For example, when students learn about pressure in physics, it is conceptual. When they see their robot submerged 15 feet under water and the camera housing comes back up with a crack in it, the concept becomes reality,” he adds. 

Andy Schaafs, senior director of development at The Robotics Education & Competition (REC) Foundation, which hosts the VEX competitions, agrees. Tournaments for high schoolers are more like basketball games, Schaafs says, where they also learn soft skills like playing well together and cooperation. In addition, “Students that leave these programs don’t just leave with a great experience,” Schaafs says. “They tend to adopt a different mindset when it comes to a future career choice.” He believes coding and robotics will be important for the future workforce and, likely, for everyday living. 

Ritch Ramey, director of education for the Association for Advancing Automation (A3), says preparing kids in the sciences teaches them the ability to pivot in careers if necessary, banking on soft skills they learn during robotics sessions. “When the jobs of tomorrow are still unclear, what we need to build today are problem solvers,” he adds. 

And the best part about robotics competitions is that interested students find different ways to participate in robotics, says Schaafs. “If you don’t like ground-based robotics, you might like drones. There’s so many different flavors to robotics, it’s not just vanilla,” Schaafs says. In 10-15 years, he sees that robotics teams will be the norm in every school. 

Bringing Educators and Schools in

Robotics certainly is the norm at North Union Local Schools in Richwood, Ohio. Under the supervision of Kristi Matlack, a high school robotics teacher and VEX Robotics coach, the robotics team first qualified for the VEX world championship in 2013 and has done so every year since.

For Matlack, a teacher with 27 years of experience, it all began with two robotics kits. Always looking to learn new things, she started out teaching robotics to middle school students. The curricula developed by Project Lead the Way, an organization that develops STEM curricula for use by U.S. elementary, middle, and high schools, gave her a good start. 

It was through Ramey that Matlack learned about national robotics competitions. Deciding to test drive the idea of a competition with her seventh graders, she had them tinker with two robotics kits. Their enthusiasm was infectious. “We joke that we drank the Kool-Aid with robotics; students at both the middle and high school just jumped in with both feet, it was an application of what they had learned in class and it was fun,” Matlack says. 

Much like North Union, high school teams all over the country are “jumping in with both feet” and adopting robotics as a team sport. Matlack’s advice to educators: Don’t be afraid if you don’t know something. Don’t be afraid to try because your students are going to fly with it.” Matlack says her job as coach and educator is to give her students the opportunity and a safe space in which to do robotics. Matlack herself does not have an IT background but that has not deterred her from coaching robotics.

On the flip side, RECF has intentionally made it easier for high school educators like Matlack to work with the robotics kits and become coaches, Schaafs says. “It’s set up to be accessible and not intimidating,” he says, “we want to be a place where any educator who has a student interested in STEM can come to the RECF and find a home,” he says. 

Working with Business

Glade Montgomery of Project Lead the Way says it’s “absolutely critical that students are exposed to future careers and the possibilities that are available to them after high school.” As students move into high school, internships and capstone projects with local businesses might help. Montgomery believes in introducing teachers to the diverse possibilities as well so they can in turn, discuss them with their students.

Case in point: Project Lead the Way created a partnership between Lockheed Martin in Dallas and area high schools, where they would bring high school interns into their facility. The program that started ten years ago with just five interns has grown to at least three times the size, with students returning to the program even through their college years.

The link between a step toward engineering careers and robotics is pretty apparent to Grindstaff. “Robotics teams have to reduce their learnings and their ideas to practice. This means that their idea of a new camera system has to go through design, review, manufacturing, and test. They must see the process all the way through. For students who want to pursue engineering, this is typically the first time they have ‘engineered’ something that must merge with the components from a large multi-disciplinary team. And it’s a huge advantage when they get into college and secure internships,” Grindstaff says.

Montgomery advises educators to lean on available resources to pursue business outreach opportunities. PLTW, for example, has developed a “Community Connections” roadmap which walks educators through the process of setting up relationships with community businesses. 

For Highschoolers and Parents

Parents, too, play an important role in building and sustaining interest in robotics in children. Saisha Singh studies petroleum engineering at the University of Texas, Austin, spurred by an interest in STEM that started when she was just a preschooler in Walpole, Massachusetts. Along with younger sister Vanya, she would build LEGO systems in the attic and receive encouragement from her parents to participate in science fairs. Saisha’s interest in robotics started with the Junior First Lego League (FLL). Her father, Vinay Singh, helped assemble a team together with children from neighboring towns.

As Saisha moved into high school, she participated in the robotics program. “The Walpole High Robotics team was memorable to me because it was one of my first real experiences working with large scale machine hardware, which I never had access to before. I enjoyed the time I spent in the machine shop. We had access to everything: soldering machines, lathes, drill presses, 3D printers,” Saisha remembers.

One of the biggest advantages of being a part of high-school robotics was the wider view of engineering that it afforded, Saisha says. “This exposure allowed me to explore electrical hardware as well, and opened my view of engineering outside of the software and FLL experiences I grew up with. It motivated me to merge my interest with energy and go into petroleum engineering,” she says. “I wanted to do something within renewable energy and environmental sciences but I didn’t want to let go of the technical experience I had grown up with. My experiences with CAD and hardware within robotics allowed me to get an internship helping design smart water meters, which showed me the need for robotics and innovation within the growing renewable energy field. Robotics solidified my interest in engineering and made me confident that that is what I wanted to do with my future,” she adds.

Dad Vinay Singh advises parents to be involved. “If your kids have skills and show interest, make sure you follow through and give them the opportunity to grow,” he says.

Parents and educators agree that earning robotics in high school prepares students for technical careers or otherwise. “These are tools that are immensely valuable to further technical training, internships, and first jobs out of college,” Grindstaff says. 

Matlack also shares the sentiment. Her own 20-year-old son, Nate, was passionate about robotics and LEGO as a child. He went through technical training at Tri-Rivers Career Center, bypassing traditional college, and now enjoys a flourishing career in the robotics profession.

Investing early and often in robotics and STEM education pays rich dividends — for children, educators, and business.