Kensuke Shimojo

Even before there was talk about robotics joining the athletics department, we always joked about how robotics is absolutely a sport; how we have to carry an 18 pound robot everywhere, spend hours cutting and building with metal and run to the tournament’s match field last minute so we don’t get disqualified after fixing the 10th thing on the robot that broke down that day. Every tournament was always hectic and so energetic.

My first regionals tournament as a 9th grader was overwhelming in the best way possible. Several dozens of teams would come together in a high school gym under blaring fluorescent lights; your hearing would be flooded by the crowd’s chatter and the announcers’ narration of ongoing matches on the game fields. On each field, 2 teams of 2 robots fought and competed to get the most points in front of rows of bleachers filled with enthusiastic parents and less enthusiastic siblings.

Subsequent tournaments only got more exciting and energetic, with signature tournaments in Boston and Northern California having elevated match fields spotlit with colorful moving lights in a dark gym or venue. Seeing the robot you spent hours designing and building go up against other robots never became tiring — it was nervewracking, to be sure, but it was always exciting.

To get to that point, I had to overcome a lot of difficulties in the work we put in before the big days. But for each difficulty, there was always something new for me to learn in robotics. It was through discussions and debates with my teammates that I learned communication and to balance ideals with reality.

After seeing several strong robots at competitions, I noticed how many of them just followed the same overall design with slightly different executions. At some point I had this ideal of creating a robot designed completely different from the others that nobody else could’ve seen coming, using its difference to beat the competition.

For such a STEM-y activity where it might seem like there’s always an absolute answer, there really isn’t; a lot of different ideas feel like they could work really well to different people, and that’s when disagreements happen.

It’s expected, but to make it work, you need some level of concession, aka knowing went to call quits — that’s what I had the most trouble doing, especially to my most idealistic ideas.

While I tried my best to concede whatever sounded reasonable, sometimes I pushed hard on wacky ideas and mechanisms. Sometimes it worked — especially in our sophomore year season when we had weirdly designed remote competitions, some wacky mechanisms helped us stand out and win awards.

But in junior year’s game, we took an unused, untested idea too far.

At the beginning of the season in junior year, the team agreed to make a design that was completely different from the design rising to become the meta: the most agreed upon design in the community. We spent hours and hours trying to get it done in time by the next competition — a design nobody’s built or tested before.

And how did it go in the competition? We had to disable one of its lifts for it to stay in the rule’s size restriction, one of its few scoring mechanisms was incomplete, and while we miraculously made it to semifinals, all the finalists used the meta design, making it clear how it worked a lot better.

So when we decided to redesign the robot, I decided to put a hold on those off-the-rail ideas, since too much of it wasted the team’s efforts over the summer and the beginning of the year, and given everyone’s courseload, took way too much time to complete.

But the robot that resulted felt basic and always a step behind what the others did, since we just followed in their footsteps. We couldn’t win awards or do as well in matches.

Through programming skills and driving, we qualified for world championships, but I still felt like the build quality wasn’t helping at all.

So when we decided to redesign again for world championships, I really researched forums, brainstormed, analyzed other team’s designs, and finally figured out a potential design that this time, struck that perfect balance of being reliably tested while having a new twist that could give us an edge, a perfect balance of realistic-ness and ideal (I could go into the specifics but that would add another page to this).

After putting in a lot of effort into planning, 3-D modeling, and communicating with my teammates about this idea, many of them were on board, and we finally finished it over spring break. We did incredibly well at a scrimmage with our sister teams, and seeing everything finally work was so, so rewarding.

Even though at World Championships, we lost to the teams that would become world champions earlier on, I’m glad to have finished the season trying something novel while staying realistic enough to actually bring it to fruition.

Right before World Championships began, the game designer showed up to give a speech, and he said something along the lines of “you must’ve had a hard time with this game, and in fact, I hope you had a hard time! Because it’s from hard times that you learn and grow.” Half of me cursed him for bringing suffering to me, my team, and HW’s sister teams. The other half (reluctantly) acknowledged how much I learned throughout the more difficult parts of the robotics experience.

I could keep going with more bad habits I managed to fix because of robotics, but enough difficult parts. It’s easy to remember stressful or sad moments, but it’s just as important to hold onto the more chill and fun parts.

I’ll never forget the all-nighter we pulled after Worlds was over and we had to leave the hotel at 4 am. We played Super Smash Bros, watched the new episode of Spy x Family, and left the hotel sleep-deprived but happy.

Or when my teammates and I ate ramen together at our robot driver’s house during a remote competition.

Or when our coach Mr. Theiss drove all of us back to the airport at midnight after a competition, and the quiet, chill space in a car full of robotics kids who are usually busy and hectic.

I made a lot of friends through robotics in 9th grade and am still so close with many of them. Mr. Theiss showed me how to be positive when things don’t go the way we want and also how to stack 6 suitcases worth of robot parts on a tiny airport cart. So, thank you, robotics, and good luck to those doing robotics now as formal athletes!