Empowerly

Student profile

Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.

In 6th grade, I used to go to my friend [name]’s house to play with legos. One weekend we watched Endhiran, a tamil movie about a scientist who creates a humanoid robot to improve Indian society before gaining self awareness and seeking revenge against his creator. After the movie, while Pranav and I were discussing how cool the robot in the movie was, his parents asked both of us if we would want to build a robot. We said yes in excitement. We formed a robotics team named the Inventing Stars and had other mutual friends join.

We joined the First Lego League where we competed against other robotics teams in our district. Each year the league would announce the theme and challenges for competition. The challenges range from opening doors, throwing balls, picking up and moving objects. Each team builds a robot to complete the tasks.  In addition to building a robot, each team has to come up with a solution to each years theme. In order to come up with a robot design that would perform the assigned task, our team would hold brainstorm sessions. During the brainstorm sessions we had 2 guidelines. The first guideline was “the crazier the idea, the better,” and the second guideline was “no one should ever criticize an idea, no matter how crazy it sounds.” I remember at first i questioned the purpose of this brainstorm method. I wondered why we had to come up with crazy ideas when we could stick with the straightforward ones. My doubts were cleared when we entered our first tournament. As we competed against our first team, I realized that their robot had a similar design to ours. They used a small hook like fixture to pick up objects similar to ours. When our team was judged on robot design, the judges asked what made our robot unique. We answered by explaining the effectiveness of our fixtures to the judges. After the judgement we looked back on the judge's comments and learned that our designs were two similar to other teams. We did not win any awards that year but we learned that we had to do something unique for next year's tournament to impress the judges. When the new robot challenge was announced our team immediately started to brainstorm unique ideas. During one brainstorm session, I came up with a radical idea to use a tall V shaped fixture to knock down balls from a stand instead of moving a lever to the balls one by one. At first I was hesitant to share my revelation with my team because my idea was outlandish. Eventually, I forced myself to share it with the team. I was expecting laughter but my teammates were respectful and genuinely liked my idea. After some fine tuning we implemented it into our robot game improving our efficiency and giving us uniqueness. I realized that there is merit to our brainstorm guidelines go beyond robotics.  

As a team, we learned each other's strengths and weakness. I learned that I am good at creative live expressing ideas through visuals.  I created a lot of preliminary concept sketches for potential ideas we came up with. [Name] was able to program the robot For the FLL project, our team came up with an idea from a pill dispenser for senior citizens. The pill dispenser implemented a mechanism that uses a pac-man shaped wheel to transport one pill from the storage compartment to the opening. Our team felt it was difficult to express how the mechanism worked through words and was afraid the judges would not understand what we were talking about. One day when I was messing Google Drawing in my free time trying to come up with a cool looking sketch, I happened to draw something that looked similar to the pill dispenser. After some coloring and labeling, I presented my sketch to my team. My team loved the sketch and used it in our write up and presentation. When I asked why they liked it so much they responded by saying its was simple and clear and it fulfilled its purpose well. This experience sparked my hobby of sketching using Google drawing which later morphed into using Photoshop in my free time.  I also learned that I was weak at sharing my ideas verbally to an audience. Most of the time I would stand back and let my teammates talk when presenting our ideas. 

Many people think you don’t have to be social to be in the field of STEM. My experience in robotics has taught me the opposite. I was forced to break out and attempt to speak to others because the judges in FLL grade on team member participation so I had to share my thoughts and ideas verbally. Over the many years I have completed I have many judges who work in STEM. I remember one particular judge who worked at IDEO say that he had to constantly communicate with his superiors and colleges. He advised our team to learn to effectively communicate our ideas with one another in order to move forward as a team. He concluded by saying that communication and networking are important skills to have no matter what you do in the future. I feel like my robotics experience has taught me the importance of effective communication when working as a team.