When teacher Amanda Glunz started a robotics team at Audubon Technology and Communication High School four years ago, there were just five members.
Now, the program has grown to 32 students and two teams, including the newly formed all-girls team Av414nche. The newest team was designed to give girls an opportunity to break into science, technology, engineering and math, also known as STEM.
“We went with Av414nche at first, because you know how avalanches fall down? It’s like breaking down the barriers,” Audubon junior Lily Sanders said.
The team consists of builders, programmers and a marketing team.
The teams give students an outlet to build confidence and skills in STEM, receive mentorship and improve social skills, Glunz said.
Building the robot
Several steps go into turning a concept from paper into a moving and functioning robot, said Jorja, an eighth grader at Audubon and member of Av414nche.
It all starts with a sketch.
“Then we started to actively use Legos,” she said. “Eventually we switched from Legos to Onshape (a computer-aided design (CAD) software program), and then once we had the Onshape model down, we just decided to go from there.”
After building the robot, the team uses trial and error to get it to function as best as possible.
For the team’s upcoming qualifier competitions, robots need to shoot balls into a goal. Audubon students compete against other schools across the state in several robotics competitions.
Sanders is part of the team that helps to build the robot. For their most recent competition, she tested out different wheels for their robot to see which ones launched the balls best.
“Really just figuring out what will work and what will not work,” Sanders said. “It’s really just a lot of trial and error.”
The robot is named Ava, which is short for Av414nche.
Jorja, a programmer on the team, works to make the robots move.
“The robot does not know anything until we tell it,” she said. “It wouldn’t just do it by itself.”
She said programmers first worked on the code that operates the wheels to make the robot move, then they code the wheel that makes the ball shoot.
Mentorship and higher education
When they aren’t working on the team’s social media, the marketing team looks for mentors who can introduce students to the fields of technology and engineering.
Most mentors are students from local universities including Milwaukee School of Engineering and Marquette University. The marketing team also has their own mentor who works in graphic design.
Some students like Davin Dacio, an Audubon junior who takes a dual enrollment course at Milwaukee Area Technical College, get college-level programming experience that he uses on Audubon’s co-ed robotics team, DreaMKEepers.
Starting at a young age
Jaida Campbell, a junior on the marketing team, said they are trying to recruit younger students to the team.
Middle and high school students at Audubon share a campus. Middle schoolers begin robotics at the school by participating in the FIRST LEGO League. League members work with coaches and teammates to build Lego-based robots for engineering competitions.
Though Jorja is only in eighth grade, this is her first year on the high school robotics team.
She started as a fifth grader in the FIRST LEGO League and by the seventh grade, she and Glunz worked on a coding project in the Fiserv Future Techies program, where they made it to nationals.
“It really inspired me, the fifth grade LEGO League,” Jorja said. “I love Legos and I was good with technology so I was like, OK, why not join my favorite things?”
Alex Klaus is the education solutions reporter for the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service and a corps member of Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues and communities. Report for America plays no role in editorial decisions in the NNS newsroom.
Jonathan Aguilar is a visual journalist at Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service who is supported through a partnership between CatchLight Local and Report for America.
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