Katie Widen was thinking about a career in writing when she entered Rufus King High School.
Now, after two years of building robots, she thinks engineering might be a better fit.
"I figure if I'm not good at that, I can always fall back on welding," said Widen, 16, who has done welding while helping build robots.
Along with her teammates from Rufus King and Bradley Tech high schools, Widen is in Atlanta this weekend for the 2009 FIRST Robotics Championship, an event that has drawn more than 10,000 students to the Georgia Dome. During the two-day competition, which ends Saturday, student-adult teams will try to out-maneuver other teams' robots while performing a specified task.
Through the nonprofit group FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), robotics programs have grown steadily at schools around the country for the past 17 years. At the high school level, the extracurricular activity is part engineering lesson, part career exploration, part collaborative exercise and part leadership-building experience.
But the competitions are the highlight.
The robotics season begins each January, when registered teams are shipped a common set of mechanical parts and a rulebook. They have to build a robot that can perform a specified challenge. At the end of the six weeks, teams must ship their robot to a storage site, and they won't be able to touch it again until it is shipped to a competition.
"It's an extremely accelerated learning experience," says Mike Wittman, leader of the More Community Robotics Team, which is also competing in Atlanta this week.
Wittman founded the team four years ago. St. Thomas More High School plays host, but the team accepts students from all area high schools, including Oak Creek, Cudahy, Homestead and Greenfield.
"It's a life-changing experience for them," Wittman said.
The number of high school FIRST Robotics Competition teams has grown from 44 in 1994 to 1,680 in 2009. The group, which was formed in 1989, gets national support from NASA and helps teams get local support from business sponsors.
A hallmark of the high school robotics teams is the inclusion of adult team members. The adults serve as mentors - participating businesses in Milwaukee include Rockwell Automation, GE Healthcare, Milwaukee School of Engineering, and QuadTech - and help guide the students through the different aspects of machine construction, from welding and drilling and molding to computer programming.
"Instead of just having one coach, like a sport, we have 10 mentors," Widen says about her team. "You get more comfortable talking to adults, and it helps you mature faster."
Widen says hanging with adults has other benefits: You have built-in connections when you need a sponsor for other activities. And, when you travel, she says, you never really have chaperons - the adults are your teammates.
"I want to mentor when I'm older," Widen adds.
Paul Jutrzonka, a teacher at Rufus King, leads the Ultimate Protection Squad, made up of King and Bradley Tech students. He said the influence of the mentors gives kids in the program a leg up on other students going into engineering after high school.
Colleges have started offering scholarship money to FIRST students, and some businesses have started accepting the students as summer interns - before they go to college.
Sarah Wittman, 18, the daughter of More Robotics team leader Mike Wittman, has already interned for Husco International in Waukesha. She is currently a robotics educator at Discovery World on the weekend and runs some other programs at Marquette University. She just accepted an offer to attend Cal Tech.
In her last year as a student team member, Wittman says she's pleased with the team's robot. This year's challenge was to pick up balls and place them in a trailer pulled by another team's robot. Meanwhile, the other team is trying to place balls in the trailer pulled by your robot.
Her team's machine has a conveyor belt to scoop up the balls and a webcam that can pan and tilt.
"It's definitely a step up from where our robots have been in the past," Wittman said.
The Ultimate Protection Squad also thinks it has a strong machine. Its robot, which picks up balls with a mechanical belt, has needed so little maintenance this year that Jutrzonka says the students who work in the "pits" have requested Lay-Z-Boy recliners because they've had so little work to do between matches.
Both teams got invited to Atlanta this year because of previous victories: Jutrzonka's team won the Midwest Regional in Chicago this spring, and Wittman's team won a regional event in Minnesota, as well as the prestigious Chairman's Award for gracious professionalism at the Milwaukee Regional.
The ultimate goal may be to outscore your opponent, but the Chairman's Award has nothing to do with winning or losing.
Rather, it's determined by how well students play the entire game
