Three years ago, Robotics was introduced and formed at CPHS. Now, the organization is known throughout the school and the club has around fifty members, all split into various groups.

The Robotics team comes together to build a robot in what the team calls the “build season.”  Then, they will go to a state wide competition in March and compete, and if they land one of the top three spots, they move onto worlds.

Senior Caroline Woodall explains that build season lasts six weeks and six days with each member putting in 10 hour weeks. She goes on to explain what the theme would be for this year.

“The game theme this year is ‘First Stronghold’ and it’s just basically a very medieval theme, and its very contact based and there a lot of sensors to go through,” Woodall said.

While Woodall was a part of the founding group, it wasn’t her idea, but wants people to understand why Robotics so crucial to young students.

“It’s a really good opportunity for students to learn STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) and it also looks good for college, and it’s just really fun and we have random gatherings,” Woodall said.

Woodall isn’t the only one that feels this way though. Junior Maddie Cox and lead of the programming department, explains how she got into Robotics in the first place.

“Before freshman year I was going into fashion,” Cox said. “When I came to robotics with my friend and was like ‘that’s cool’, and I always like computers. I was always good with them but I never really heard about computer science till high school.”

With excitement Cox also explains how the fashion and technology industry are coming together and becoming one of the top industries.

“Did you know that they [the fashion industry] is becoming the number one [industry] because wearable technology dresses are becoming a thing,” Cox said. “So they are creating dresses with light inside of them and there are these shoes that you have an app for and you can change the pattern with the app.”

Being head of programming, Cox shows us why programming and coding are essential for the robot to operate.

“We make the code for the robot and create the control system which the driver uses when driving the robot,” Cox said. “Programming is crucial to the robot’s design because it is just a hunk of metal without code and we design the most sufficient controls so that in competition no one can beat us.”

However, Robotics doesn’t just entail building and designing a robot, but also creating a brand, this year’s brand being “Family”.

“Our theme [each Robotics team creates an individual “theme” based on each Robotics team’s ideology] this year is family and that is because we spend a lot of time together and we start to actually feel like a family,” Woodall said.

Creating the theme and distributing our idea through the branding [creating the logo], design of T-shirts and allocating money. In charge of it all is head of the business department Connor Nesbitt.

“That [the Business Department] basically entails handling all the money and design elements,” Nesbitt said.

Branding is one of the biggest parts of the business team, according to Nesbitt. This is when the business team will design and develop an image and logo that the Robotics team will be recognized for.

“Branding is fun, you get to make your own team image,” Nesbitt said. “This is crucial to building the robot because if we have a memorable robot or a memorable brand and all the teams competing knows us for something, that will really mean something to us.”

Robotics is the new way of the future, according to Nesbitt.

“Robotics is such a good field because it will help you with finding basically any job in the technology industry in the future and it will introduce you to a lot of cool opportunities,” Nesbitt said. “We have engineering, mechanical engineering, software design and business design and design.”