Botmen& Botwomen

Time on the Academies’ robotics team leads to success in college and careers.

In 2010, an Albany Academy Advanced Placement computer science student asked about starting a robotics team at the school and, after some exploration of the types of programs available, The Albany Academies’ FIRST Robotics Team was formed. That was the start of a successful 12 years (and counting!) of creativity, learning, and competition for the students involved. The robotics program at the Academies has evolved over time; what began with a small group of motivated students has turned into a booming program that continues to be competitive year after year. Students who have participated speak highly of the program and many credit what they learned from participating with preparing them for success in college and their first careers.

The team’s first coach, former faculty member Jeanette Langan, remembers the integrity the team displayed from the beginning and how hard team members worked. “The academic program at The Albany Academies is demanding and, at first, team participation didn’t count toward one of the extra commitments,” she said. “It was amazing to see students’ discipline and commitment. It was also very gratifying to see the support they gave each other, which allowed members who were a bit shy or intimidated initially to thrive and become leaders.”

Alexei Buchanan ’13 was a member of the team in the early days when it got its name—Botman Team, which grew out of a joke about their practice room resembling the Bat Cave of Batman fame. Changing Batman to Botman seemed like a fitting progression. “I focused on the mechanical and design aspects of building the robot and working on our strategy for scoring points,” he remembered. “My favorite part of being on the team was actually putting the robot together and fabricating the elements for completing the tasks.” After getting a degree in welding and enrolling in commercial dive school, Alexei is currently working towards becoming an underwater welder.

From the start, the focus was on problem solving, time management, troubleshooting, and teamwork, according to Langan. “Documenting work and lessons learned in the engineering log was always a struggle, but it’s an important part of the program and a taste of expectations and practices in the professional world,” she said. “Team members were always responsible for the design and build—no parent or mentors building the bot for them! However, if they identified and could evaluate and articulate an issue that they needed help solving or needed advice on, I was always prepared to put them in touch with people who could help.”

In those early years, Aidan Clubb ’19 realized that the engineering notebook (where the design process, from inception to build, is documented) needed a lot of attention. Upper School Engineering Teacher and current Robotics Team Coach and STEM Coordinator John McNally P’37 said, “Aidan established a nice base for our protocols on improving our engineering notebook by documenting the design, sketching in daily journals that reflected all of our design modifications.”

Aidan, who now works as an operations analyst at an investment firm after graduating from Drexel University with a degree in economics, remembers, “I wanted to learn more about how to build and code. The Robotics Team seemed like a good place to learn a lot of skills I wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to.”

He said he believes he gained some valuable skills as a result of his participation, especially “the ability to organize a lot of moving parts and stay on top of communication with a lot of different people. Organizing our pitches for the judges also strengthened my ability to speak confidently and concisely, which is very important for job interviews.”

When Kelsey Mallory-Winegard ’20 joined the team she already had a strong background in First Lego League. “Kelsey came in and deployed her incredible skill set to the engineering notebook,” said John. “She took what Aidan started and made it even better. Her notebooks were hands down some of the best notebooks in the state for many years. Other teams would frequent our pit table just to get a glimpse of our notebook to see what we were doing.”

Now a junior at Lafayette College majoring in computer science, where she is also a teaching assistant in the department, Kelsey said robotics taught her leadership, public speaking, teamwork, and time management skills. ”Balancing robotics, school work, and my personal life in high school made the transition to college easier,” she added. “Communicating between the software, hardware, and engineering notebook teams helped me learn to communicate with the different divisions in the workforce, working as a software engineer intern at an engineering firm.”

Many former team members share similar comments about what they learned during their time on the team. Kendall Olszowka ’22, last year’s team captain, said, “In addition to the technical skills like CAD and building, I think the biggest skills I learned were how to work with a team and presentation skills. Many of the assignments we are expected to do in college are very collaborative and my time in Botman prepared me to be able to work with people with backgrounds in various areas.”

Now enrolled at Princeton University studying mechanical and aerospace engineering, Kendall said learning how to answer specific questions about their robot during competitions gave her experience and confidence to speak with college professors and guest lecturers about their own work.

Another recent graduate, Morgan Ford ’22, joined the team to get a glimpse into how to build. “I knew I wanted to go into engineering and thought that robotics would help give me a leg up before I entered college,” she said. She is now studying biomedical engineering with a concentration in biomaterials and tissue at the University of Miami.

Through her participation in robotics Morgan said she learned “plenty of engineering skills that I use in class, for example, brainstorming, the decision matrix, and collaboration. During my time on the team, I thought the decision matrix was someone only we used, but I just recently used it in class and that surprised me!”

For some students, including Jenny Ding ’20, being a member of the Botman team was an introduction into technology and led them to their major in college. “As the programmer on the team, I was able to understand basic coding skills and applications, which introduced me to the tech field. I also learned how to tackle problems in an intense competing environment and how to think about tasks thoroughly.”

“There is an incredible amount of communication that is required to solve problems and our students are really, really good at it,” said John, “I see that in action often on the Robotics Team where you’re trying to get 10-plus students to work together to design a robot to complete tasks. This requires an incredible amount of communication. It’s oral communication, it’s written communication and then they need to stand in front of judges who are computer scientists, engineers, scientists, and college professors to communicate what makes them special, what makes their robot special. The way our team comes together is really special and very organic.”

John said it’s especially nice when professionals and parents tell him the environment that has been created around the Botman Team is one they wish the professionals they work with could emulate, coming together to communicate. His response to those comments: “It’s not me, it’s these student leaders who have taken it upon themselves to bring the team together to solve these problems, to communicate their ideas.”

Erik Payton ’21 said he gained tremendous leadership experience and general engineering intuition while on the team. “I was captain of the team my senior year, and learning how to manage the team and make sure our robot did well has served me well so many times during college. One of the main things that I realized Botman taught me was understanding engineering systems.” He said he believes that he and other Botman alumni and alumnae have had a real advantage in these areas.

Erik is now a sophomore mechanical engineering student at Cornell University and is involved in an Aerospace Research Lab on campus doing research on methods of interplanetary travel.

Amanda Horne ’17 joined the Botman team to explore her interest in robotics and computer science after watching a FIRST competition and thinking robots competing in games was “the coolest thing ever.” A recent graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science and a master’s degree in computer systems, Amanda said she gained many skills while on the Botman team, including competitive strategy analysis, programming, technical system design, partnerships with alliances, leadership, and decision-making in the face of uncertainty. Today, she lives in Seattle and works at the Microsoft headquarters as a project manager.

The team’s success is due in part to the coaching style that’s employed. The coaches are hands off and while they give advice, guide, and facilitate, they will not write code or build the robots, which requires the students to solve problems themselves and to work with each other.

Amanda said, “They had a really great balance between empowering us to make our own decisions when designing, programming, or building the robots vs. providing us with advice and feedback (whether solicited or unsolicited). It ultimately helped us have the best learning experience possible.”

“At competitions I find my spot in the bleachers with the spectators and step down only on occasion to go into the pit. I relay some advice every now and then, but our coaching style is very much student driven and I’m really proud of that.” John said. “I think that at times our teammates are frustrated with what they see from other teams, how much other coaches are hands on with their teams’ robots.”

Without the countless hours that volunteers contribute to the team and the competitions, there would be no program, according to Jeannette. “It’s important for team members to give as well get. We were grateful for help from more established teams as we got started, and over the years we were able to assist other teams when they had questions or problems. We were asked to host a tournament about three years into the program and that tournament continues to this day. Tournaments can’t happen without volunteers; they participate in all aspects, from check-in and scheduling to judging and refereeing.”

Robotics is a sport of the mind. New challenges are presented each season, and the tournament series is structured very similarly to physical athletic events with opportunities to advance to regional competitions and culminates in a national championship. As with any team, the members are able to “specialize” in a position, such as builder, coder, outreach, and more while working together to brainstorm and solve the challenge. Teamwork and cooperation are critically important, especially when competing. There are two drivers who control different functions of the robot, and a driving coach who is responsible for assessing the game play and directing them in real time during a match; they must all be in sync and work together towards a positive outcome.

The performance of the robot on the field is the culmination of weeks of building and coding that the drivers are relying on to work. Every member of the team has some impact on the robot’s performance. “There has to be a lot of trust in what others designed and built,” said Jeannette. “Seeing the stronger members support and develop the more hesitant members is especially gratifying.”

“What I’m most proud of with this team is the way we moved from a complete focus on the robot and programming. Previously, we spent all our energy on the robot, but we realized after a while that a model robotics team does a lot more than just build and program robots,” said John. “Coach Walter Keeley (another Academy coach and faculty member) always said ‘you can’t rely on robot performance’ and many of our teammates took that to heart. They started to move their energy into what we do have control over and what we can rely on, and that is our notebook.”

“In the early years of the Botman Team, none of us really knew what we were doing, and there was as much time spent determining what resources we needed and finding those as there was building the robot,” said Noah Dropkin ’14 who went on to RPI after graduating from The Albany Academy. “Mrs. Langan and Mr. Keeley gave us an incredible amount of freedom in how we wanted to organize the team and build the robot, and simply made sure we were being safe while they worked on finding the resources.”

“The Robotics Team offered me the opportunity to creatively solve problems with my friends, and the freedom to tackle those problems however we thought best,” he added. Like all of the other former Botman Team members who spoke to us for this article, Noah remembers his time on the team very fondly. “Building one of these robots is not something my team and I did in our free time; it was something we did all of the time. In every class, during every lunch hour and free period, if we weren’t working on the robot it was always in the back of our minds. It’s rare to find a project that is so captivating, and I really miss that feeling.”