A Rise in Robotics

Aloera Ostermann, Staff Writer

Making a robot sounds pretty cool right? Why not make a robot that can do things like pick objects up and climb a rope. Well that is just what is being done in Manhattan High School Robotics club. The team led by senior Stephanie Wu is all about a student-based approach.

“We kind of have a little bit of a hands-off approach to the sponsorship,” Emma Detrixhe, club sponsor, said. “We make sure the kids have all of the tools and equipments they need, we write grants, we work on fundraisers, but for the most part the kids are completely in charge of building the robots.”

Freshman Party on the Hill, there were a high number of students, specifically freshman, appearing to be interested in the club.

“We did have quite a few freshman show up at our informational meeting and I think that that’s because we had a pretty positive presence at Freshman on the Hill,” Detrixhe said.

Even though the turnout was larger than years past some students do not stay in the club. Robotics takes a pretty big and serious time commitment and sometimes that deters the freshman because they often can’t get a ride or are a little more overwhelmed with it being their first year of high school.

With the amount of students in the club they have a system set up so everyone gets a chance to do some work on what they are interested in. This system consists of four different subteams. The first is the administrative subteam. They do things like marketing, making posters, recruiting new kids and coming up with fundraisers.

“They get together this pretty phenomenal fundraiser packet for all of our donors so that they know what they are donating to basically but the marketing element of it is really interesting,” Detrixhe said.

The next is the electrical subteam. They are in charge of all the wiring and and soldering. The mechanical sub team is the one that is actually in charge of building the robot itself. Finally there is the programming sub team, that use JAVA to program everything the robot will need to be able to do.  

In order to figure out which subteam each person is on, they take a survey over some skills they might use in different subteams. The survey tells the leaders what subteam each individual would best fit with.

MHS attends two main competitions. First is one at the end of October, called the Cow Town Throwdown. During this the students take last year’s set of tasks and have to accomplish them with their new robots. In January, the tasks that their robot has to do changes. They create a new course and run their robots through that. Their last main competition is regionals, which will take place in Kansas City.