As we enter the homestretch of another robotics season, I feel obliged to acknowledge how high school robotics teams have benefitted my family. Two of my daughters are passionate members of a high school robotics team. One belongs to a FIRST® Robotics team, and the other to a VEX® Robotics Competition team. Both are excellent international programs with their respective advantages and disadvantages. Full disclosure: I am not a robotics coach and I was never on a robotics team in high school. They did not exist in my area when I was growing up, but I wish they did, and I wish I had the wisdom to choose to participate. As a parent and science teacher, I have gotten to closely observe how robotics teams combine hands-on STEM learning with the passion and commitment of a sports team, and how they inspire learning with purpose like no other school-based activity I have ever encountered.
Robotics is answering an open-ended question. Robotics requires bold thinking and imaginative problem-solving. Each season kicks off with a unique and specific challenge that inspires creativity. Kick-off day inevitably involves lively discussion and argument (the academic kind). Competing design ideas vie for the team’s majority approval. Robotics requires that you closely collaborate with others. Excitement is in the air. Then, the struggle begins. Parts need to be machined and put together. Wiring diagrams need to be drawn and implemented. Programs need to be coded. Supplies are limited. There will be late nights and long Saturdays. It is a minimum of a 250-hour annual commitment for each robotics coach and a 200-hour commitment for each of the participants. Some teams log 400 or more hours. It is precisely this struggle with purpose that cultivates perseverance and leads to growth. How often have we, as parents and educators, asked ourselves the following questions:
How do we inspire students to think boldly and innovatively?
How do we cultivate a fierce resolve for excellence within students?
How do we create a classroom environment that welcomes challenges and setbacks and models overcoming them with joyful learning?
Robotics is one answer with proven results.
Through robotics, students get to experiment with tools and programming. Generations ago, farm kids purposefully worked with tools and cared for plants and animals. This stimulated the development of neural connections in ways we still do not fully understand. Today, the living environment of young adults is largely devoid of these hands-on stimuli, and as a result, brain development is inhibited. We should still intentionally and regularly immerse ourselves in nature, but robotics is a newer venue that offers many of the same benefits and others that serve students well in the 21st century.
Robotics inevitably involves failure and disappointment, and learning how to persevere. Failure and disappointment have been virtually removed from today’s classrooms, and it has been to the detriment of students. Yes, we need to combine them with support and encouragement, but when we don’t allow young people the possibility of failure, we rob them of the feeling of authentic accomplishment.
“Those who are excellent at their work have learned to comfortably coexist with failure. The excellent fail more often than the mediocre. They begin more. They attempt more. They attack more. Mastery lives quietly atop a mountain of mistakes.”
-Eric Greitens, Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life
During every robotics season, students learn, and every robotics coach relearns, that meticulous planning and relentless preparation are vital to success. Yet not sufficient by themselves. Unforeseen adversity will come along, and it becomes clear that while your team is not responsible for every challenge it encounters, it is responsible for how it reacts to those challenges. In overcoming these challenges you develop the courage and skills to live a better life.
“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.” -Nelson Mandela
Through robotics, students learn not to let perfection be the enemy of progress. You don’t need a perfectly designed robot or a perfect performance by your drive team to progress to the next round. You just have to be better than your opponents. And losing is only temporary. So is winning. The teams that consistently perform best at robotics competitions are deeply reflective. They are self-critical and humble enough to focus on how they can do better even when they win. They either win and learn or lose and learn, but they always learn. Robotics is truly a curricular extracurricular activity. It fulfills some of the most important learning goals of any 21st century high school.
"I don't use kids to build robots. I use robots to build kids."
-Dean Kamen, founder of FIRST
In 2021, FIRST® Robotics published a landmark 96-month longitudinal study in collaboration with Brandeis University. It found that 81.3% of FIRST alumni majored in a STEM-related field in college. The benefits were far more profound for female students. The vast majority of these STEM graduates are now employed in their field. What other high school activity comes even close to these results?
America, every community, and the world need more scientists and engineers. It is a moral imperative to educate the next generation of people who will design our infrastructure, and sources of clean energy, and provide for our national security. Every high school shares this responsibility, and one of the best ways to meet it is through a robotics team.
In 2024, if your high school does not yet have a dedicated robotics space, faculty, and funding, your high school is behind the curve. When I graduated high school, high school robotics teams didn’t exist. Today there are well over 11,000 VEX® Robotics Competition teams and 3,000 FIRST® Robotics teams. It takes vision, leadership, top-tier faculty, dedicated funding, and grit to get started. A team needs a head coach and an assistant coach who are willing to put in hours and effort comparable to the head coach of a sports team. One of them is usually a technology teacher with safety certification to teach students how to use tools safely and supervise them as they do so. The other is typically a physics or computer science teacher. It is difficult to identify, recruit, and retain a skilled faculty member willing to make the sacrifices necessary to be a successful robotics coach, but it is possible with focused effort.
“Don't tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I'll tell you what you value.”
-Every financial advisor I have ever encountered
Typically, a robotics team costs the school district about $48,000 annually (2024 dollars) if you do it properly. That’s $30,000 for equipment, supplies, and competition registration fees and another $18,000 for coaching stipends. It is important to confront this simple truth directly: If your head robotics coach is not earning a minimum of $10,000 and your assistant coach is not earning $8,000 then the school district needs to do some self-reflection. Forgive me for being blunt, but placing such a low value on the time of educators is demeaning to the education profession. Under such circumstances, the coaches probably won’t remain coaches for long, nor should they. Besides the hours, it is a lot of responsibility and requires an uncommon skill set. Each year, more and more forward-looking high schools align the robotics coaching stipends with the highest athletic coaching stipends in the school district, and I’m generally supportive of this concept. Based upon the impact it has on the future earnings of our students, I’d argue that the robotics coaches should get paid more than the athletic coaches, but that’s a discussion for another time. You might find it hard to believe, but there’s still many high schools out there paying robotics coaches like they are supervising a club during their lunch period, so I’ll be amiable and take progress in the right direction. Funding for robotics programs should be included in the regular school budget, not dependent on parents or fundraising. However, sometimes leadership has to be grassroots. Some schools form a booster club to secure funding to start up the program or supplement what the school does provide, because sometimes people have to see the impact first to realize its potential. But a booster club should not be expected or relied upon to fund a team in the long-term.
Coaching robotics is hard, and I am deeply grateful to the teachers who do it. I'm also grateful to everyone else who supports the teams, especially the unpaid volunteers and referees. Here's to all those who give hours, miles, and dollars to support a team, you are nothing short of heroic and have my greatest respect. Cheers to the parents who tirelessly support their children. And to the Board of Education Members and school leaders who had the courage and vision to fully support a robotics team before it was popular to do so. High school robotics is absolutely worthwhile for every stakeholder, but it is hard. Pioneering a high school robotics team requires changing some of our historic priorities as school leaders to prepare our students for a world that has already changed and continues to do so. That’s why we do it, and why we should support it. I think President John F. Kennedy would have agreed with this sentiment.
“We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. It is for these reasons that I regard the decision last year to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear as among the most important decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the office of the Presidency.”
-President John F. Kennedy, Address at Rice University, September 12, 1962
Image Credit: "White House Photographs. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.