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Robotics team is up for the challenge
(by Karen F. Mrnarevic - April 29, 2008)
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Photo courtesy of Lynne Ferrara
The Pascack Pi-oneers accept the Chairman’s Award, the highest honor given to a team, at the 2008 New Jersey Regional FIRST Robotics competition.
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Joe Ferrara, a towering 18-year-old resident of Montvale, entered Pascack Hills High School four years ago with a dream to be a basketball star. When he was cut from the team, he was more than a little discouraged and unsure of what his future at the school would hold.
But then an opportunity came his way to be a founding member of a completely different kind of team, and he took it. This team, like many sports teams, focuses on teamwork and competition, but as a member, Joe has done more than just dribble and shoot his way through high school. He has also learned how to build robots.
Joe is just one 45 members of the Pascack Pi-oneers (as in the number pi: 3.14…), a team of students from Pascack Hills and Pascack Valley high schools who spend each year preparing for and participating in the FIRST Robotics Challenge.
“It’s changed his whole life,” says his mother, Lynne, who also heads up the group of “Pi Parents,” who dedicate their time to helping the team keep up with the demands of the challenge throughout the season. Joe’s story is one with which his teammates, and countless other students who participate in the program nationwide, can identify.
It’s time the Pi-oneers get their due recognition. While the team is held to all the rigorous standards for excellence sports teams require of their members, press coverage of FIRST teams and competitions is rare, and most newspapers do not have a “Robotics Engineering” page.
From consumers to innovators
FIRST, which stands for “For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology,” is an organization founded in 1992 by Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway scooter. The mission of FIRST is to inspire young people to be science and technology leaders and to foster self-confidence, communication and leadership among participating students.
According to Pi-oneers Coach Philip Paspalas, “We are charged with spreading the word and philosophy that math and science is for everybody.” Being involved with FIRST, he says, allows students to break the cycle in which many American youths find themselves – bystanders to a changing world, rather than facilitators of change. “Instead of being consumers,” Paspalas asserts, “they have a chance to be innovators.”
Paspalas believes it is vital to point out the following to young people: “Your goal of being a basketball star may be a pie in the sky dream, but making a difference is something you can achieve.” He believes that FIRST has a definite advantage over sports, since it combines teamwork and highly competitive action, but at the same time promotes creative thinking and imaginative use science and math. “It does everything athletics do,” he says, “but it involves a serious academic component.”
The Pi-oneers have a special preparation program, called “Pi-Tech Academy,” which allows older team members to act as mentors to younger ones, and lets all team members focus on building both technical and teamwork skills. “We do a lot a preparation throughout the fall so kids can learn all the things they need to know to really contribute,” says Paspalas. Then, in January, “build season” kicks off as the team travels to NJIT to receive its robot building kit and learn this year’s FIRST Robotics Challenge. Following the kickoff, says Paspalas, “they design and build like crazy for six weeks, until we go off to participate in the competition season.”
Competitions are not nearly the winner-takes-all, dog-eat-dog brawls that one may expect from the likes of “BattleBots,” a robot competition organization whose Comedy Central program brought robot battles into the mainstream. “It’s not only about winning,” says Lynne Ferrara. “It’s also about helping other teams and just showing a spirit of sportsmanship.”
Paspalas concurs. “There’s a real community feel to it,” he says, “Everybody is looking to help each other… it’s one of the points of the competition,” otherwise known as “gracious professionalism.”
Peers as mentors
The Pi-oneers have taken the idea of gracious professionalism to new heights in their competition activities. In its rookie season, the team was mentored by members of various other New Jersey teams. The Pi-oneers decided that as they developed a higher degree of expertise, and learned to function effectively as a team, they would take the initiative to give back to other less experienced teams.
Now, the Pi-oneers mentor three local middle school teams, which participate in the FIRST LEGO League (FLL), a league for students age 9 to 14. In addition, the Pi-oneers run their own mentoring program for members of their high schools’ FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) team, helping them build the necessary skills to move up to the FIRST Robotics Challenge (FRC) team, through Pi-Tech Academy.
But the Pi-oneers’ dedication to mentoring is not limited to the Pascack Valley School District. This year, the team has offered its assistance to another FRC team from Jersey City, loaning a robot for the team to practice with, visiting to help with mechanical issues, inviting the team to see how the Pi-oneers run meetings, and providing daily telephone and e-mail assistance. At regional competitions, the Pi-oneers have devoted time and resources to other teams, loaning parts and tools, and assembling, rewiring and programming competitors’ robots.
The team has also taken it upon itself to design a guide to Autodesk Inventor, a computer program used in building the robots. The Pi-oneers mailed out copies of the tutorial to other New Jersey teams before competition season began this year and received a fantastic response. As if that weren’t enough, at each regional competition they attend, the Pi-oneers set up a “scouting database,” accessible to all competing teams, which allows them all to review and analyze each others’ robots.
Embodiment of the purpose
The team has been rewarded for its hard work. This year, the Pi-oneers took home the “Chairman’s Award” from the New Jersey Regional Competition, the most prestigious award offered by FIRST. According Paspalas, the award came as quite a surprise. “We basically couldn’t breathe for a while after that one,” he says, noting that it is rare for such a relatively new team to win the award.
The Regional Chairman’s Award is not given to the “winner” of the competition, per se. How the winning team’s robot places in competition has little to do with it. The award honors the team that represents a model for other teams and best embodies the purpose and primary goal of FIRST, which is to inspire greater levels of respect and honor for science and technology among the global community. The Pi-oneers went on to compete in the National Championship in Atlanta, from April 17 to April 19, where the team had the chance to win the National Chairman’s Award.
The efforts of the mentors, sponsors, parents, and Paspalas have begun to pay off in some strikingly quantifiable ways. “One of the really neat things that has happened is a real elevation of the idea that technology and engineering are things that kids can do… It’s something that a kid can have a satisfying and fulfilling career doing,” says Paspalas.
In fact, a survey of the Pascack Valley Regional School District conducted last year found that 15 percent of the graduating class went on to pursue an engineering major in college, more than twice the national average of six percent.
Paspalas feels that this is proof of what FIRST has done for these students. “Kids realize that they can put their knowledge to work and do something that’s good for the world,” he says. “That’s gracious professionalism – to solve the problems that we all face.”
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