Robotics Club gives Gibbons students an opportunity to learn how to code, build, engineer, and do all the things that would be needed to pursue a career in technology or engineering. The club competes in the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) World Challenge which is a huge organization from all across the globe. There are three levels: FIRST World Robotics, FIRST Tech Challenge, and FIRST Lego.
The Gibbons Robotics team competes in FIRST Tech Challenge, competing all over North Carolina.
How it works:
Each team gets a challenge at the beginning of the season. Students then have to build to complete that challenge to score points to score in the match, which last two minutes. The first part is autonomous where they do it by themselves; the robot has to run by itself for the first 20 seconds then the rest of it is done by drivers.
A near-future hope for moderator Ms. Diane Ripollone is for there to be a robotics course implemented into the school so that kids who put in so much time now can get credit for their hard work.
Outreach is a big aspect of Robotics Club. Every year they do something for the community, like the astronomy weekend they have done for Astronomy Ent National Science for the last 6-7 years.
“Robotics Club is a place that accepts everybody. It doesn’t matter who you are, everyone is welcome. It does not matter your experience; we have kids who have never coded in their life and are now our top programmers. We have kids who have never built anything in their life and now come up with ideas so easily off the top of their head,” said Ripollone.
“Our robotics team is actually host to 8,000 teams. They use the parts library that our robotics team created Onshape, which is now a sponsor of the team. Our team took parts from all over with different companies and coded them and now all teams come to use those parts,” said Ripollone.
The robotics team last year traveled to Worlds to compete for a trophy in Houston, where the team competed against 252 other teams. The team finished first in connective awards in their division. Ripollone said she was proud of her students, especially last year when they won in Worlds.
