Superintendent’s Spotlight: Wildcats Robotics Team

As part of its Superintendent Spotlight series, the Warwick Valley Central School District highlighted the work of the high school’s robotics team. The Wildcats robotics team is gearing for their biggest challenge yet: the NY Excelsior FIRST Tech Regional Championship on March 8 and 9 in Utica. Only the top three teams in the region will advance to April’s World Championships in Houston.

Team members spent their February recess inside the high school’s tech room with team advisors and Warwick Valley High School teachers Andrew Warren, Doreen Fothergill, and Ray Mark, reengineering their design for the upcoming regional challenge.

“I think one of the biggest things about this season is, yeah, we take ourselves seriously, but you can’t take it too seriously,” said senior team member Abagail Foust. “We still have fun. We all enjoy being around each other.”

The Wildcats Robotics team is comprised of three subgroups: building, coding and outreach. “The students on the building team do a lot of the actual physical building of the robot and 3D modeling,” explained Foust, who manages outreach. “The code team codes the robot, which includes a lot of troubleshooting. And the outreach team creates the portfolio, organizes events, and handles team communication overall.”

It took a total team effort at the Peekskill FIRST Tech Challenge earlier this month to secure the Wildcats’ regional berth. The team’s robot came up just shy of qualifying marks for the regional championship. However, the team clinched third place for the “Inspire Award,” which recognizes teams that best exemplify the overall spirit and values of the FIRST Tech program, showcasing not only strong engineering skills, but also community outreach and gracious professionalism in all aspects of participation.

Placing for the Inspire Award boosted the Wildcats overall score and catapulted them into qualifier status.

“It was really rewarding the way things have paid off,” said Warren. “Not only having a strong robot and making it to the finals of our first two qualifiers, but placing for the prestigious Inspire Award, which was a really big deal for the team. It’s been to be able to reassure the kids that the ways they’ve reengineered our design have been the right moves!”

The Wildcats apply the engineering design process to everything they do — identifying challenges, conceptualizing solutions, building and implementing those solutions, then readjusting and retesting. In a midseason design breakthrough, the team overcame struggles with an oversized and inefficient claw mechanism.

“We redesigned one of our claws so that we could pick up the blocks with more precision,” Foust explained. “The change allowed us to cycle more rapidly in terms of scoring.”

Jamie Curtis, a student on the build team, highlighted some of the Wildcat robot’s upgrades.

“Our current design uses vertical and horizontal extensions with claws that transfer between them, which makes it a lot more efficient at scoring,” he said. “One of the things we found was that adding more complexity can actually be beneficial. You can’t oversimplify everything.”

The Wildcats Robotic team was founded by Warren three years ago, and students from every grade level have gotten involved.

“Last year, we went from five members to 14 members,” Arnav Sinha, a sophomore, explained. “While we didn’t qualify for states [previously], it was still a great learning experience. All the freshmen back then learned all the fundamentals of robotics, how to code, how to build.”

Peer communication and learning are also at the core of the Wildcats Robotics team. Sophomore Luke Fowler credits his teammates for teaching him the ins and outs of engineering and mechanics. He also feels the team and his teammates have helped him become a better communicator.

“It’s when I got into robotics that I learned how to talk with other people a lot better,” he said. “And I feel like I get much more involved with groups now.”

Foust and Jack Carter, two senior team members, have been inspired by their involvement with the Wildcats Robotics team to follow post-graduation pathways into engineering fields. Foust said that her college entrance essays about her robotics team experiences played a big role in getting accepted to Clarkson University’s Solinsky Engineers Program, where she’ll be studying mechanical engineering in the fall. Carter plans to attend Penn State to focus on lab research.

With the regional competition just days away, the Wildcats Robotics team is confident that their teamwork, perseverance, and focus on fun will continue to take them to new heights — possibly all the way to Houston, where world championship dreams await.