Quarry Lane Robotics Team Headed to the World Championship

The Quarry Lane School in Dublin, California is getting ready to send their middle school tinkerers this week to the VEX Robotics and Engineering World Championship in Louisville, Kentucky.

The team consists of seventh and eighth grade students: Annika Gupta, Ria Passi, Michelle Lee, Neha Pant, Adit Shah, Anay Bhakat, Devin Shah, and Krishna Veeragandham, and is the first robotics team in the school’s history to have an equal number of both boys and girls and is the first VEX EDR team to have made it to world championships. The students take pride in having conquered the gender bias that is, unfortunately, an underlying factor in the STEM world, by having an equal representation of both boys and girls.

“We are trying to not just encourage the idea of girls in STEM but of boys and girls working together in this field and accomplishing goals together – a reflection of the world out there,” says Dr. John Rogosic, Department Chair for Quarry Lane’s Applied Science and Engineering department. “Research tells us that middle school can be a make or break time in building interest in STEM and STEM careers.” Keeping this in mind, the school has invested both time and energy in elevating their engineering curriculum during the middle school years. The robotics class is offered as part of an elective at the middle school level.

The robotics team has worked hard throughout the year, learning skills like robot repair and building, driving and support operation, coding ability, as well as designing and building the tournament robot, while documenting their work along the way. As a result of their hard work, their robot won the Design Award and was Runner-Up in the California State Championship.

“They've gotten better and stronger both as a team and as little robotics engineers." says Mr. Harsha Vemuluru, one of the robotics teachers at Quarry Lane. “The students used their perseverance to beat out heavy competition during the local and state competitions.”

"When I first joined the team, I thought I will not be able to drive and do the building part of the robot and was comfortable with the programming part," said team member Annika Gupta. "Throughout the year, as I learned, I became more confident with time."

At the State competition, girls and boys alike collaborated in driving the winning matches and had an amazing winning streak with their alliances, which greatly boosted their confidence going into “Worlds”. The students have been exposed to other teams from other schools, where gender inequality is an underlying factor in figuring out who does what— leaving the bookkeeping jobs to girls and letting the boys doing the tinkering.

"I like that we are a truly balanced team, that was definitely a big contrast to many other teams at the state competition, said", Mr Hay, Engineering Pathways teacher at the Quarry Lane. “It was great to see cross-gender collaboration and teamwork, especially in all the tuning and repairs between the matches during the state championship.”

On the Quarry Lane team, both girls and boys took on the most rigorous tasks that robotics and engineering has to offer. “We view each other equally,” say the students on the team, “We enjoy having such differing points of view and opinions as it greatly aids us in coming up with new ideas for design and building methods.”

Although having people with such different points of view does, in fact, lead to clashes at times, the students make sure to quickly resolve them for the sake of efficiency and maintaining a good dynamic within the group. For Quarry Lane’s Robotics Program, the growth in co-ed participation that is happening at all levels is encouraging news.

At the VEX World Championship, they will spend nearly a week competing with and meeting other robotics teams from all over the world, from different backgrounds and compositions. While the team is currently had at work on their robots in preparation for the championship, they are proud of how far they’ve come from their first competition to now, and credit it to the dynamic in their group.

-Quarry Lane would like to thank both students Annika and Neha, and parent Aashima for contributing this piece on the QLS Robotics team as they prepare for the 2016 VEX Worlds Championship. Please join us in wishing our team “good luck” in Kentucky.

Photo courtesy Shutterstock