Updated at 3:50 p.m. – This year’s challenge for the Richard Montgomery High School robotics teams is to build a robot that can scale a plastic model of a mountain, pick up balls to place them in cups and use its arms to hang in mid-air from rings.
It’s a high-pressure competition to test students’ engineering, computer programming and organizational skills.
It’s also an opportunity to apply science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education that big-name sponsors in tech-related industries, including Lockheed Martin, Booz Allen Hamilton and the United Therapeutics Corp., are lining up to support.
But at least for now, robotics teams are relegated to club status in Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) and many other school systems, presenting the teams with financial and logistical challenges beyond fabricating parts for a robot.
“If you can support all the other sports in the county, then you should be able to support this as well,” said Sunil Tohan, a 16-year-old junior at Richard Montgomery and a member of one of the school’s two robotics teams. “The teamwork, problem-solving, cooperation and the competition are the same things you learn from being on a sports team. It’s the varsity sport for the mind.”
Tohan joined students and mentors from other MCPS high school robotics teams earlier this month to discuss the situation with some members of the county’s Board of Education. Next week, the recently formed coalition of MCPS robotics programs will sit down with Interim Superintendent Larry Bowers.
J.J. Biel-Goebel, a Bethesda resident who mentors the team at Walt Whitman High School, said the teams realize cash-strapped MCPS isn’t in a position to dedicate funding to robotics.
The teams, however, would like to stop having to rent classrooms for after-school sessions. Biel-Goebel said some teams in the county are paying as much as $3,500 a year to rent classroom space from the Community Use of Public Facilities (CUPF) branch of the county government, which rents classrooms, gyms and school fields to all outside groups.
The teams also have issues with how long it takes to spend the money they have fundraised.
At Whitman, each year’s competition requires parts costing between $5,000 and $7,000. While the team relies on private donors, and companies such as Lockheed Martin, Booz Allen Hamilton and others for the money, it still must get the permission of the school’s financial secretary to spend the funds, a process that can take two weeks at a time.
The annual competition Whitman participates in gives all teams their assignments at the same time and expects a finished product to evaluate at the end of a six-week period.
“We’re trying to access our own money,” Biel-Goebel said. “We have six weeks to build our robot and it’s important that we don’t waste that time buying the parts.”
“With such a short competition schedule, you kind of need parts as you want them,” Tohan said.
Richard Montgomery’s two teams participate in a different competition than Whitman but operated by the same organization—FIRST, a nonprofit that runs the events in which state and regional winners move up the ladder to an annual national competition.
To avoid having to pay CUPF fees, Richard Montgomery’s teams meet in a room at the Rockville Library.
There were six active high school robotics programs last school year in MCPS, enough that Biel-Goebel, who works as a program manager at the University of Maryland, says the teams are getting noticed.
“[The school board members] didn’t realize the scope of what we’re doing. The idea is mainly to start conversations. It’s not going to happen overnight, but if Montgomery County does want to make STEM a big part of its future, we think this is one of the ways they can do it,” Biel-Goebel said.
Tohan said the board members in the meeting—student member Eric Guerci, Rebecca Smondrowski and Jill Ortman-Fouse—expressed lots of support, but cautioned that the school system is facing a difficult budget period.
"I think we were all very impressed with all of the work they do and the value of that work. This is something we'd like to nurture. It's project-based learning and intellectual curiosity," Ortman-Fouse said. "The unfortunate part is the funding issue. We've made a lot of hard choices. Unfortunately, it makes it really hard to support activities like this."
Ortman-Fouse said the board members hope to help the teams get quicker access to the money they raised. They also suggested the teams hold sessions at the same times as other activities, something that could lower the price of having to keep buildings open after school.
Tohan's Richard Montgomery team is preparing its mountain-climbing robot for the state competition in December. The team will have two-and-a-half minutes to score as many points as possible.
Points are earned when a robot performs certain tasks and makes it to certain spots in the 12-foot-by-12-foot competition space. Teams also earn points by attaching sensors to robots so they can detect different colors.
The team is allowed to pre-program the robot to move in any way it sees fit for the first 30 seconds. For the next two minutes, the team remotely controls the robot.
Tohan, who lives in Darnestown and is in the International Baccalaureate program at the Rockville high school, said he wasn’t particularly interested in science before joining the team two years ago. Now, he hopes to pursue a career in biomedical engineering.
“When my friends or other people come to see these events, they are immediately in awe of the scale, the size of the events and the speed and energy,” Biel-Goebel said. “We want kids to learn these skills and we want to make this a priority.”
