Funding may be small, but the dreams are big
The Yates High School robotics team meets in an abandoned classroom with a couple of desks, a band saw, a drill press, two cordless drills and some hand tools.
Only four students make up the core of the team, but with two Rice University students as mentors, they used their meager resources to build a basic robot for their rookie year in the FIRST Robotics global competition.
Their robot’s functions may be limited, but the ambitions of the team members are boundless.
Rashard Randall, a 17-yearold senior, said he is sampling whether to become a robotics engineer. He plans to study computer science at Sam Houston State University next year.
“There was a lot of math, and if I didn’t take pre-calculus before this, I would have never known anything about building this,” Randall said as his Third Ward teammates tweaked their machine. “This is everything I’ve learned in math up to now, and then some.”
Learning to love math is what FIRST Robotics is all about. For the last two weeks, I’ve written about how the program gets Greater Houston high school kids excited about science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
Getting more kids into STEM is important for the economy, especially in Houston, where businesses complain about too few STEM graduates. The shortage hurts U.S. competitiveness, with China graduating three times as many engineers every year.
Parents at some schools have done a great job recruiting employers to sponsor FIRST Teams, as they do at Cinco Ranch. Some corporations have sponsored teams at schools just outside their fence lines, as some have done in Pasadena. After years of support, both teams have perenni-
al mentors, advanced machine shops and plenty of money.
Yates, like many of Houston’s most challenged schools, has none of those things. Dee Wallace, a former science teacher who helps coach the team, raised the $6,000 entry fee through a grant, but otherwise the team is building from almost nothing.
“FIRST was built around trying to get more minorities and women involved in STEM,” Wallace said. “To put their hands on a machine, to see some of these physics concepts becoming real, that’s the biggest thing robotics brings to the students.”
Two Sigma, a hedge fund that leverages computer technology to manage $52 billion in investments, helped buy tools, and it provided stipends for two computer science students at Rice University to mentor the team. Cannon Lewis, one of the mentors, said he immediately saw the competition’s potential.
“It’s so much more important that kids who attend Yates, or similar schools, know that there are these opportunities out there to do STEM jobs, to gain an education, to have these skills,” he said. “Yates has a lot of latent talent.”
Kai Holnes, the other mentor and herself a FIRST veteran, said Yates’ limited resources may have kept the team’s robot relatively simple, but those constraints can also encourage good design. She hopes more companies will help expand the team.
“For a rookie team, they’ve done really well,” she said. “Sponsorship is the backbone of FIRST. It’s what allows teams to grow and to continue.”
Team members said they enjoyed designing, building, programming and operating the robot. Several said the team allowed them to make new friends because their parents normally kept them at home after school to keep them away from trouble.
“You’re meeting new people, and it’s something fun to do when there is nothing else to do,” Travon Lewis, a sophomore, said. “I hope that it will help me as I get older, and I can put it on an application for college.”
Jim Ward, the managing director for Two Sigma in Houston, said he is proud of the team and plans to continue sponsoring it.
“Our hope is that every year will have more participation than the last, and that we can get students interested earlier so they will participate for several years while they are in school,” he said. “I would encourage companies to copy our experiment and talk to their local university computer science and robotics teams about sponsoring mentors.”
As politicians fail to adequately fund public schools, businesses must get involved in training the workforce of the future. Executives who want to make a difference should attend the FIRST World Championship at the George R. Brown Convention Center April 15-18, which is free and open to the public.
The disparities among the public schools I visited was shocking, and while those will not be fixed overnight, what the kids share is a love for building robots.
A company that wants to make a difference by encouraging teens to pursue the careers of the future could make no greater difference than helping these kids chase their dreams.