FULLY WIRED TEAM 7407

by Leslie Virostek

On a given weekday in the Winter Term, the glass-walled space of the Johannes J. Shattuck ‘93 Robotics Laboratory evokes a first impression of epic clutter and total randomness: a couple of students are leaning over a circuit board at a work-table island that, like every other flat surface available, is strewn with cables, wires, batteries, pliers, and assorted tools. LEGO toy pieces lie next to “swerve drive” wheel components. There’s a sprocket here, a pneumatic cylinder there. At another table a student is cutting a foam swimming pool noodle into segments. The ambient noise gives some indication of what the other students scattered throughout the lab are doing at the computer-aided design stations and in the adjoining machining workshop: computer clicks, a whirring-vacuum sound, the banging of mallets, the buzzing of drills, and such chatter as “Righty tight-y, lefty loose-y” and “Has anybody seen the …?”

Don’t be fooled by the seeming chaos. What’s happening here is the highly purposeful activity of Team 7407, the Choate Rosemary Hall Wired Boars. Diverse in terms of gender and ethnicity and drawn from multiple states and countries, this cohort of students is combining its collective knowledge and skills to design, fabricate, and assemble an autonomous robot for matches in a premier league of interscholastic robotics. It’s part of their curriculum in the Advanced Robotics Concentration (ARC) signature program. Among its capabilities, their robot will be able to lift, carry, and place objects in precise locations and arrangements, all while deciphering April Tags — they look a bit like QR codes — which will help it accurately position itself to perform tasks in different areas of the competition arena. For these students, achieving division semi-finalist status at last year’s world championships in Houston, Texas, is less a point of pride than a source of motivation. They’re in it to win.

A MULTI-FACETED, FAR-REACHING ROBOTICS PROGRAM

One of the most constantly used spaces on campus — during the class day, after school, in the evening, and on weekends — the 1,500-square-foot lab suite in the Lanphier Center for Mathematics and Computer Science is the home and hub of a wide-ranging, multifaceted, highly impactful Robotics Program. On one end of the spectrum, it offers students an opportunity to explore a new interest through introductory and intermediate courses. On the other, the intensive ARC curriculum provides deep theoretical learning and the vital experience of the design engineering process to prepare students for college engineering programs and related STEM careers. On the extracurricular side, there’s a Sunday Team for novices, hobbyists, or anyone who wants to participate in robot building or competition. Meanwhile, student volunteers of all levels of expertise teach robotics and STEM concepts in three campus programs for children from preschool age through middle school. Perhaps the best thing about the Robotics Program is that it embodies the best of Choate: a welcoming environment for diverse groups of students, academic rigor and intensity, collaborative and hands-on learning, a spirit of fearlessness in the face of challenge, service to the greater community, and an overall aim to foster innovation and positive change in the world and the workplaces of tomorrow.

Established in 2009, the Robotics Program features a suite of six courses under the aegis of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. Some 70 students are enrolled in robotics classes in any given term. Faculty member Andrew Murgio, who co-heads the program, says that the introductory course is a “low pressure” environment where novice students — or those whose main academic interests may lie elsewhere — can learn the basics and experience the joy of making a functioning robot. “They are so excited when they realize: ‘I just built this and it is actually moving on the floor,’” says Murgio. “And then they send a video of it to their mother.”

Leanna Robie ’25 took the introductory course last year and says there is plenty of room at Choate for robotics enthusiasts of every kind. Her participation on the low-key Sunday Team enables her to balance her interest in robotics with her commitment to playing varsity squash. She says, “It’s an environment that allows me to feel like I’m part of the robotics community without being part of the intensive ARC team.”

Arc Is The Crown Jewel

One of eight specialized signature programs at Choate, ARC has been the centerpiece of all things robotics since 2018. Students who are accepted into the program complete a sequence of three honors-level courses, starting with Robotics Design and Fabrication and ending with Autonomous Robotics. The Winter Term course in-between is wholly dedicated to the FIRST Robotics Competition. (FIRST was founded by inventor Dean Kaman and stands for “For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology.”) During class time and in required afternoon lab sessions and additional weekend meetings, students work collaboratively to create a competition robot that can perform tasks autonomously and be operated by student “drivers” using remote controls. “Our Sunday Team and the introductory classes use VEX robots, which have pre-made component pieces that you have to assemble,” explains Murgio. “But in the FIRST league about 90 percent of the robot is custom designed and manufactured.”

The kickoff for the competition season, which includes local and regional events leading up to nationals and worlds, happens in early January, with a livestream revelation of game rules and tasks that the robots must perform. From there students start organizing into sub-teams in CAD design, programming, fabrication, assembly, and communications. Sixth-former Sherry Li ’23, who is a CAD sub-team lead and also a programmer, loves the frenzied energy of the period right after kickoff. “You have 20 to 30 students trying to work together and build off of each other’s ideas,” she says. “And at the end of the first two weeks we have this entire vision of everyone’s thoughts.”

Prototyping comes next. Does the robot need to lift something? The students will create one or more versions of a suitable “elevator” component. (Those foam pool noodles, by the way, are used as bumpers around the edge of the robot’s square wheelbase.) The team’s previous robots and aggregate competition experience will inform both their robot design and game strategy. Students will “stress-test” the robot in early competitions, with every short qualifying match giving an opportunity to uncover flaws that might require redesign before the bigger events.

Following the successful footsteps of Choate’s early robotics teams, which qualified for VEX World Championships three times, Team 7407 has garnered over a dozen accolades. These include awards for industrial design, innovation in control, and first place at the 2022 New England FIRST District Granite State Event.

Preparation For College And Career

Altogether the ARC experience gives students key skills to pursue future careers in STEM fields, says faculty member Dee Clark, who was a professional engineer and a vocational engineering teacher before coming to Choate. An example is computer-aided design. “The software and the process of creating a 3D model is directly applicable to industry,” she says. Other industry-relevant skills include CNC manufacturing, which involves programming a machine to cut complex geometries; mechanical assembly and familiarity with a variety of tools; and electrical engineering to integrate the software, hardware, and mechanical components.

Clark says that project-based learning is ideal for teaching the engineering design process. Students must learn how to fail — and how to make design improvements accordingly. “Sometimes I give vague instructions on purpose so that there is more for students to figure out,” she says. “Sometimes students get frustrated, but it’s all part of the magic!”

Teachers and students agree that one of the most vital skills that ARC teaches is how to work as an engineering team. Sidharth Rao ’23, a lead programmer who plans to be a computer science and engineering major in college, says he was always most comfortable working individually. “Until I joined ARC, I needed to do everything myself,” he says. Being part of a large team of students means relying on the work of peers and “having to trust other people to have your back.”

Throughout the process of creating their robot and operating it in competition, Choate’s Wired Boars receive support from several mentors who are STEM professionals. These include a cybersecurity expert working at Electric Boat and a mechanical engineer at a plastics recycling start-up company. Mentoring is a key aspect of the program, in part because it’s a model used in industry, according to Dee Clark. She notes, “All engineering jobs involve mentorship.” Robotics mentors exemplify the many types of STEM jobs that students might aspire to. But their role is mainly to be a resource, according to Sidharth. He says, “The mentors are very knowledgeable, and they provide help, but they let the students lead.”

Outreach And Service

One of the most successful and well-resourced teams in FIRST competition, Choate’s Wired Boars embrace the mantle of leadership and work to lift up other teams. As part of a national Open Alliance project, they share knowledge and field questions from other teams with less experience, often describing programming and engineering solutions they’ve developed to address difficult aspects of robot design. A key feature of FIRST is that the organization is grounded in the concepts known as “coopertition” and “gracious professionalism,” which encourage teams to be supportive of one another, to cultivate an ethos of kindness and inclusivity, and to be ambassadors for STEM learning and robotics.

In that spirit, ARC students mentor the Sunday Team and collaborate with other student groups, including the Computer Hardware Club and the GirlTech Club, to help create a positive and farreaching STEM community at Choate. In 2021 ARC students launched three FIRST LEGO League teams for children of Choate faculty and staff members. The Discover group for preschoolers is mostly play-based learning. In the Collaboratory at the Wallingford Public Library, Asher Ciardello ’24 and Cam Merrit ’26 have mentored the elementary-aged Explore cohort, which has learned about how energy is collected, transferred, and used. “Our prompt is to find a problem in the community and then find a solution,” says Asher. “So we have been talking about rising energy costs and teaching the kids about renewable energy.”

Garrett Curtis ’24 and William Gao ’24 are among the volunteers with the Challenge group. They’re helping their middle school charges to program LEGO robots to perform tasks on a table-top track and to research and create poster presentations on topics that interest them, including gravity batteries and nuclear energy.

Choate Robotics really helped expose me to what engineering would be like, and it gave me some valuable skills to work from. Ultimately, Choate Robotics taught me how to think and make in an iterative, evidence-based way, as well as how to effectively coordinate people and teams.

My current work isn’t directly related to what I learned at Choate, but robotics and its programming component did put software engineering on my radar as a career. Ultimately, I think it was the general sense of problem solving and reasoning fostered by robotics and the Choate STEM curriculum that has been most helpful in my later education and current career.”

Making An Impact

Other than a championship banner, the most coveted prize of the FIRST season is the Impact Award. Last year was the first that Choate vied for it, preparing a video and a written submission documenting Team 7407’s hundreds of volunteer hours of service and outreach, in addition to their goal of promoting diversity and equity in STEM fields, where many groups have historically been underrepresented. On average, more than 40 percent of ARC students are women and about 50 percent are people of color.

“We don’t want to reflect today’s STEM workforce,” the students wrote. “Instead, we want to mold our team to cultivate diverse STEM cohorts of tomorrow…We hope to change the demographics of the field to encourage innovation and equal representation.”

This goal is already becoming a reality, thanks to alumni of the Robotics Program who have graduated in recent years. Almost 100 percent of ARC participants go on to study STEM in college, many at prestigious institutions such as MIT, Yale, Georgia Tech, and the University of Southern California. There can be no doubt that the passion for learning and collaborating, the highly developed skills, and the positive ethos of the Choate Robotics Program are making their way into the world.

Choate Robotics was the first place that I was truly introduced to the concept of the design process. While at Choate, I didn’t realize that engineering would be the specific path I ended up going down, but in hindsight, robotics is one of the most pivotal experiences that led to me pursuing mechanical engineering. Choate Robotics taught me how to voice my ideas, collaborate, compromise, and commit to my decisions. Most importantly, Choate Robotics was the first place that I really considered engineering or robotics as a field I was capable of being a part of, and for that, I cannot thank the program enough.”