Community

Our program has an immense amount of outreach in the community. We aim to bring opportunities to students in our area to partake in any robotics programs. We also aim to introduce students to robotics.

5 years ago, Damien Spartan Robotics (6526D) won the Community Award at Worlds. This was an essay which perfectly sums up our outreach and community and perfectly represents our program's outreach.

Then, last season, we won the Community Award the second time (6526G), this time in the form of a video that tries to capture the vast contributions we have made to the community.

That Community Award Essay

by Ray Sun Ed. Charity Trojanowski

Damien High School Robotics, 2016

Two years ago, robotics at Damien High School was unheard of. The original two teams of the robotics club, 6526D and E, had undeniably humble beginnings: a closet for a workspace, the most basic of parts, and no aluminum for a game where lifts were critical (Toss Up). Sure, flickers of news at school about our victories in regional and national competition abounded, but robotics remained unknown among extracurricular activities. Hardly honored among the decorated football players and debaters, we strived for two years to establish robotics as a recognized “thing” to do, while expanding robotics beyond just the allure of victory in the VEX Robotics Competition.

Robotics at Damien arose with the Project Lead The Way (PLTW) engineering program there, with the proximity of the two bolstering robotics and STEM education at Damien. Many of the robotics program members are PLTW students who either received their first taste of the excitement of robotics in the second-year class (through an autonomous “harvester” project), or brought their expertise from the club to help out their fellow students. Meanwhile, PLTW students in robotics practice the engineering skills from the program—documentation, modelling, and the design process—with increasingly notable successes of multiple Design and Excellence Awards.

Our club also seeks to expand robotics and STEM education beyond the VEX Robotics Competition through various programs in the community. We run annual summer camps—open to primarily middle school students—teaching the basics of VEX construction, programming, and the VEX Robotics Competition. Many of our current members first gained experience in these camps and have gone forth to become groundbreaking designers and programmers who are passing their expertise onward.  The summer camps have also opened the door to get girls involved in our program. Damien is an all-boys Catholic high school, but the robotics program is a good way to involve girls from our “sister” school, St. Lucy’s Priory High School. Integrating girls into our program has been an enhancement for all of us.  

Additionally, we have established our own competitive robotics program with the Parallax Boe-Bot. This year, 35 middle-school teams from 20 different middle schools will compete at our school’s first annual Robot Challenge.  The teams will compete in three challenges: line following, maze solving, and a competition of coordinating the robots moves to music. Our Boe-Bot program seeks to inspire more students to explore robotics and STEM, bringing the eternal, singular joy of experiencing one’s very own creation leap forth into life to schools which, like Damien, once had no such opportunities.

We roboticists also support the collaborative growth of our own community. Newcomers are never simply thrown into the hubbub of competition without introduction through summer camp and hour-long training sessions led by veterans. Beyond such training at Damien exists remarkable inter-team support, with all teams sharing the results of experiments and programming techniques. An exemplar of our camaraderie is a tradition of giving impromptu whiteboard lectures, veterans’ soliloquies on anything from elementary PID to chassis design to calculus to anyone willing to listen. 

With the momentum from our recent victories at the California state championships (and the minor achievement of qualifying for world-level competition, unprecedented among all competitive teams at Damien), and potential triumphs at the CREATE U.S. Open and Worlds, we hope to expand the impact of our program further, bringing robotics to more students while deepening the support and camaraderie within our robotics community.