High school students display their robotics skills at FPL
Event part of FPL’s bid to support creative educational programs.
JUNO BEACH — The 3-foot-tall robots with multicolored wires raced around the tile floor. They picked up neon yellow whiffle balls and shot them into a 10-foottall basket. They hung suspended from a rope while music pumped through the Florida Power & Light cafeteria.
All while being controlled by the teenagers who built them.
Nearly three weeks after the last day of school, students from six high schools in Palm Beach, Martin and Broward counties put the specialized skills they learned during the school year on display for a crowd of FPL employees, and their children as part of FPL’s effort to support creative educational programs.
Lillian Harrington, now a junior at William T. Dwyer High School in Palm Beach Gardens, said her one year on the school’s Mega Awesome Robotic System team — MARS, for short — has given her a wealth of experience and the chance to meet all kinds of people.
Harrington does programming for the robotics team and said most people expect programmers to largely work alone. It’s actually had the opposite effect on her time in high school.
“It’s a learning process, and when you actually go to competitions, you get to interact with a lot of different people, which is actually the most exciting part for me,” she said. “The process is really interesting, talking to other teams and seeing what they can do on the field, it’s really great for honing your analytical and people skills.”
Maureen Wilt, senior education program manager for FPL, said the company has sponsored the robotics program for five years because it’s a way to blend students into STEM fields — science, technology, engineering and math — in an appealing way.
“Young people like to do things that are engaging and fun, and this is an example of that,” Wilt said. “They could be doing a lot of things with their time, but instead of just being in a lab or doing experiments, being able to build a robot and meet kids from all over the world that participate in this is fun for the kids.”
Wilt said FPL hires 240 paid college interns every summer, a large majority of which come through programs like the high school robotics showcase. She said she hopes the interns speak to the high school students and encourage them to follow in their footsteps.
“I really want my employees to engage with these students,” she said. “We’ve started to hire a number of young people who have come through the high school program and gone to college, and they’re now working here.”
In addition to the tangible skills acquired in working on robots, Harrington said the teamwork aspect of robotics competition and how it teaches students to work with each other is just as valuable.
“Going into college, it obviously gives you the skills you need to start off in robotics or if you want to go into an engineering field,” she said.
“I’m not looking at an engineering-type career, but even if you’re not looking for engineering, the skills you learn here will help you in any job you take.”