Way back in about 2012 when my son first joined robotics, the batteries barely lasted a match. I started out helping by just collecting the batteries from the teams after their matches, getting them on chargers and handing out fresh batteries. From there I moved to coaching.
He’s now several years into a mechanical engineering career. I coached my daughter and plenty of great students that weren’t mine between them and since then. This year my daughhter co-coached with me and the kids we coach are heading to Worlds.
I always liked S.T.E.M. and wanted to join robotics in high school, but I didn’t want to join if it was only guys.
At my school’s club day I saw the founding president of our club with no one at her booth, and when I talked to her I saw how much she loved robotics.
So, I decided to join because I realized I wanted to be like her; never looked back.
I get that this was kind of an old topic, but I actually joined robotics for 3 reasons.
My mom kind of held me hostage. Due to my entire family being intrested in STEM, *with the sole exception of my sister and my family pushed me to join robotics.
I was actually super experienced/been through half the VEX continuum. I had been doing VEX GO in Elementary School and I honestly loved it. I wanted to continue doing VEX. And this brings me to a funny story, I could have done VEX IQ since Elementary. My school hosted this massive speed coding challenge, and I had the best time, under like 7 minutes or so for like a 30 stage coding challenge. And they actually reccomended me for the school robotics team, but I ended up switching to a school that didn’t have a robotics club the very next year. This was like when Full Volume was peaking.
I loved coding. I had 3 years of JavaScript, 1 year of Python and HTML, and 5 whole years of block coding under my belt. And robotics would let me do exactly that.
Today, I love robotics more than anything, with my sole goal being to make it to VEX Worlds an win if I can.
I took my school summer camp, hated it, got it on my schedule for half a semester the next year, tried to switch to another, but said switched elective wasn’t for my grade level, so I had no choice but to do robotics. Then I found a passion for it and joined the yearlong course (aka VIQRC comps), and boom, now I’m going onto a highschool team soon
story time! I was in third grade and my school offers third-fourth grade robotics. so my mom signs me up. there wasn’t any interest except for me, so they let me go to VIQRC open builds and learn stuff, and I started to get really interested. Sadly, I was forced to do third-fourth grade robotics with a future teammate and I did, I began to be more interested. So in fourth grade the coach let me be on the team with the same guy I did robotics with (his brother was on the team) which leads me to today.