On Sept. 20 2023, Zebrotics held its first team meeting of the school year to welcome new members to high school robotics. As the team lost many members the previous year, they hope to bring the recruits up to speed to prepare for the upcoming season.

During meetings, the team offers a mul- titude of subjects to work on: fabrication for the more hands-on members, coding for the more practical members and even business. There are also other intriguing tasks such as engineering, design and wir- ing.

This year, Zebrotics is taking part in two competitions: Washtenaw Area Pick-Up Robotics (WAPUR), a one-day, low-pres- sure contest for high school teams within Washtenaw County, and FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC), an international high school robotics competition where teams work throughout a six week period to cre- ate a robot suited for the corresponding year’s game.

“It’s really fun to see the ideas in the teamwork and the growth from people that didn’t know how to apply all these engi- neering concepts,” said George Lancaster, head coach of the team. “It was really great to see all the stuff that I teach really helping the robot come together and do what it was supposed to do.”

Each year, new games and rules are set to make sure that each season is unique. For example, this year’s WAPUR involves passing balls over a wall and loading milk crates filled with books onto bookshelves,

Dominic Nazario presents a simple robot used to practice coding. Teaching different topics such as programming and fabrication to new members always helps. “Our plan for this season is getting all the new freshmen used to robotics,” Nazario said.“We’re just trying to skate through the season.”

Zebrotics team members huddle around a robot motherboard, an essential piece of hardware that controls
all parts of the robot. Hardware is very fragile and expensive, so these group meetings help make sure that everyone knows how to handle the parts of the robot. “It’s important to know how different parts of the robot are integrated and interact with each other,” Elon Shaffer-Green said. “Everyone will work on a bit of the robot at some point during the season.”

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with the winning team taking home the coveted Can of Beans. Zebrotics is plan- ning to use this event as a chance to get the ball rolling for new members.

In the winter, the team is going to attend FRC, the main event of the season. Teams are required to design and build a robot from scratch for a chance to compete at Worlds. When Zebrotics attended the last FRC season, they performed well — but the season was not without its challenges.

“There’s always room for improvement,” said River Rountrey, engineering lead of the team. “For example, our system of del- egating and organizing tasks within our group members was definitely something we could improve upon and we hope to improve on.”

Last year, the team had a couple of con- cerns about certain members doing the bulk of the work, which led to not everyone being able to perform the tasks they wanted to. But this year, the team leads are working to make sure that every member gets to take part in what they want.

Even though the team attends various

competitions every season, their main goal isn’t to win but to use them as learning ex- periences.

“Yeah, it would be nice to do really well in competition, but that’s not our main goal. Our main goal is, you know, to ed- ucate and inspire,” Rountrey said. “FIRST stands for, ‘For Inspiration and Recogni- tion of Science and Technology.’ And that is our goal. To spread that love of science and technology to my colleagues.”

Being a small team, Zebrotics often lacks the manpower and material needed to be able to create a complex robot with fancy code. Despite all these drawbacks, they still have managed to make it to finals in com- petition and win plenty of awards in the past couple of years.

“You know, we’ve got a great group, a lot of people with good experience, and a lot of good people. So I really hope everybody learns a lot from this fall season,” Lancaster said. “And then, I hope we can come to- gether and be able to have a successful ro- bot that can meet all the objectives of the new game once we find out what it is.”