CEDAR PARK, Texas — Since September, Cedar Park High School students have been designing and building robots from scratch. Two different teams are planning out how they want to build them and what they want their robots to accomplish.
They are preparing for the First Tech Challenge: a robotics competition designed for seventh through 12th graders where students prepare their robots to compete in an alliance format against other teams. The Central Texas Regional Competition is scheduled for Feb. 24.
Maci Tu is the captain of the Cedar Park High School Robolobos First Tech Challenge Robotics team. Before discovering robotics, she admitted she was not all that interested in math or science.
"It makes it so much fun. For example, when we manufacture or just build the robots, we're using so much math to make sure this fits in this place, this mechanism will actually work," Tu said.
If they win the regional tournament, the team can advance to the Texas state championships.
"A lot of us, we stay at school until around 7 p.m. every day. And then even on the weekends, we don't usually get sleep," Tu said. "Oh yeah, it's a lot of work, but it's definitely worth it."
With artificial intelligence on the rise and dominating the headlines, Amy Lovelace, the engineering teacher for Cedar Park High School, is confident her students will be competitive in the future by learning technical skills and picking up the soft skills that come from working on a team.
"They're coming up with a basic challenge that everybody has. But how do we do something a little better, more creative than someone else? And maybe someone else has something really cool," Lovelace said. "I think all of that is going to apply to any type of job they go into."
Taking risks, preparing for unknowns and being brave to try something new is how these young minds are gearing up for the future.