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Eduardo Cuevas | The Californian

Even as the Salinas High School Robotics Club raises money to go to their first championship-qualifying trip to Houston later this month, they are engineering ways to get others interested in robots.

After recent success in regional competitions, Salinas High’s “Steel Boot” bot – and the dozen students that envisioned, built and operate it – plan to compete at the international For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, or FIRST, Championship.

And Robotics club president and bot programmer Anjo Pagdanganan wants to reach out to other schools so their students can join them.

"This team, I wouldn’t call it a sports team, nor just a club," said Pagdanganan, a sophomore. "It’s kind of like a mini-organization cause we’re helping to spread the word of STEM."

However, the group must now overcome a financial obstacle. They need a couple thousand dollars to pay for the Houston trip. The team has been fundraising for flights plus housing, the Steel Boot’s shipping and other costs. Funding doesn’t even pay for “seed money” to restart the program next year.

PROVIDED/Marcos Cabrera, Salinas Union High School District

Number 6,506

Based in a rural, agricultural community, the Salinas High program has only existed three years, a neophyte indicated by the team’s FIRST Robotics Competition number "6506": 6,505 other high school-age robotics teams were created before, many in affluent Silicon Valley schools with established programs.

But these Salinas students have worked to create an award-winning robot that has the simple task of picking up playground bouncy balls and putting them in bins. The Steel Boot is renowned for its reliability in competition.

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Club advisers Chris Evans and Andrew Rodriguez (shop and English teachers, respectively) have donated time to work with students, who get no course credit for participation. Evans has had the students work in his welding and agricultural mechanics classroom on campus, learning many core building principles as they created the new bot.

“We understand this is important for the kids,” Rodriguez said. “That’s what it’s ultimately about. We’ve come together as a group to give whatever skills we had in order to help our students because I’ve seen some of these kids grow up in this program.”

This was different from the year before, when the team commuted to Carmel to work on their robot. Discussions then, instead of a focus on engineering, were about "Star Wars," the students joke.

Silicon Valley support

Importantly for this year's build, the team was mentored by Michael Madsen, a senior engineer at the Silicon Valley company KLA. He has routinely made the trip from his home in San Benito County to Salinas multiple times per week as the team got set to compete.

While he also mentored San Benito and Greenfield high schools, Madsen joined the group just as the FIRST competition released this year's game challenge on Jan. 5 for the robotics competition. They had six weeks to create a new Steel Boot based on a Boeing-sponsored deep space challenge and materials kit.

Per game layout, the Steel Boot had to work with other schools in alliances to score points by using a robotic vehicle to place “cargo,” or bouncy balls, into "ships" and "rockets," while adding hatch panels for storage bins within a time limit. Robots could only be controlled autonomously or by camera. The Steel Boot went with the latter.

FIRST, while competitive, is team and alliance-building, too. Students and advisors note teams regularly assist with parts and diagnostics as competition ensues.

PROVIDED/Marcos Cabrera, Salinas Union High School District

To begin, Madsen had students focus on the “design for excellence” model used by his company to develop products. This entails restraint, he said, looking at the process by establishing requirements and limitations before creating the bot. It took a week for students to decide on Steel Boot.

“A lot of people might think it’s good to build a bot that can do everything,” Pagdanganan said. “In practice, for most teams that turns out to be a bad thing. Strategic design is the name of the game.”

The team immediately decided on a path, said Michael Montemurno, a Salinas High sophomore as well as a drive coach and programmer for the robot.

“What we do is pick up the balls and put them in the center ship, and we can do that like really efficiently,” he said. “So that’s where we get most of our points. Our robot is especially designed for that.”

In Evans’ classroom, students could build pieces needed for the robot. Madsen helped with software to model designs. They learned to operate machinery and apply engineering theory into practice; in the process, Evans said his classes also became interested in the project.

Robot alliances

Each teammate has a job. Some helped create the Steel Boot’s website and active social media. Others networked with competition and produced technical documentation. One student ensured the team's safety.

Throughout her two-year tenure, senior Claire Mena worked on electrical and mechanical wiring. The vice president and the only girl on the team, she said the experience has been fulfilling, something she hopes to take into her intended career path in special education. She plans to attend California State University, Monterey Bay next year.

“For my future (special education) students, I want to bring the skills I learned as much as possible because it gives such a confidence for the students that have worked in it,” Mena said. “I hope to try and take the skills I learned from robotics and give them a taste of what I learned.”

PROVIDED/Marcos Cabrera, Salinas Union High School District

When it came to competition, Salinas High’s robot held as a reliable player in alliances. It propelled them to victory, beating out more affluent schools on the Monterey Peninsula, Silicon Valley and even China in the FIRST Monterey Bay Regionals last month. They placed second and got a bid for the larger international competition this month.

All this had to be done on a limited budget. Evans estimates a robotics program for FIRST competition costs between $25,000 to $30,000.

For publicly funded high schools – let alone those in working class Salinas communities – this can be difficult, Rodriguez said. But they have received support from the community, especially from active parents like Shannon Montemurno, Michael’s mother. Students have also solicited from local companies to pay for supplies, competition and travel.

“It’s one of those reminders that we have it, too,” Rodriguez said. “You don’t have to pay all this money to attend these schools. We have the capacity as a public school to compete at the highest level.”

Still, the team is looking ahead to find a way to move STEM forward locally. Madsen is considering a “swerve drive,” to individually power rotating wheels, for an updated Steel Boot.

Mateo Brambila, a freshman who works on driving, said, “I feel like our team is actually going to help Salinas more into STEM – maybe one of the blocks,” adding he hoped to connect with other high school students and middle schools to create the next wave of teammates.

“This is a community robot,” Rodriguez said. “This is something that belongs to Salinas.”

To contribute to the Salinas High School Robotics Club’s championship trip to Houston April 17-20, please donate at: https://www.paypal.com/pools/c/8dpcEZ17pM.