The William S. Hart Union High School District’s Project 691 Robotics held a showcase on Saturday at West Ranch High School to engage with the community and inspire incoming high school students to join the team.
The student-led group has 30 members from different schools across the Hart district, and they all work together to form ideas, designs, and develop programming to build a robot that can move, throw objects and even climb.
The main attraction, a robot named LeBot James, was built in a matter of weeks to be ready for competition season, said Shreyas Hingarh, West Ranch High junior. Students lead most of the project and are provided minimal guidance from adult mentors who are mainly present for safety reasons in the lab.
LeBot James was showcased to guests at the event to inspire incoming and current students to join the team. Members demonstrated the robot’s abilities while also highlighting the friendships, technical skills and extracurricular opportunities robotics can offer. The showcase also gave parents and community members a closer look at what students in the program are capable of accomplishing.
Something Hingarh enjoys most about being a part of the robotics team is “the ability to work on the robot and just make it into reality is honestly a big thing and to do it with friends and teammates along the way,” he said. “There’s a lot of memories that I’ve made from robotics, either just working on the robot, or with other students.”
For other students, the opportunity has given them insight into what they hope to pursue once they graduate from high school and move onto higher education.
“It really gave me a good opportunity to see what’s out there in the world of engineering,” said West Ranch junior Adhvika Ram, who hopes to pursue electrical engineering.
Hingarh has plans to work in computer engineering that mixes neuroscience and robotics together, he said.
To also provide more community outreach, the Robotics team is set to host a summer camp for middle school students to provide some hands-on experience.
“We’re going to host a small competition, and teach them. We’re going to create all the materials to teach them (computer aided design), which is like the design software that we use, and our JAVAprogram,” Hingarh said.
Parents are the ones who make up the adult mentors for the Project 691 Robotics team and aside from safety, they ask the students questions and prepare them for different scenarios so they’re best prepared during competitions.
“We’ll give them ideas to think about but they end up making all the decisions. They figure out what to do,” said parent and lead mentor Nilesh Hingarh. He co-leads with Aaron Plata-Ruiz.
The robotics team doesn’t just focus on creating a fully functional robot but also gain skills essential in other professions that also help develop their confidence.
Beyond building competition-ready robots, students in Project 691 Robotics gain experience in fundraising, marketing, programming and teamwork which are all skills mentors said will benefit them long after high school.
“It’s a great learning experience for them, which is the icing on the cake for us.” Nilesh added. “They’re learning a lot.”
