What Do You Mean, This School Doesn’t Have Sports?

Sports were almost a rite of passage as I grew up. As a high school athlete, I learned skills like teamwork, time management, and how to handle failure. It never crossed my mind that other students might not have access to the same opportunities.

So you can imagine my surprise when I became a teacher and found out my school didn’t offer athletics. I felt my students were missing a key educational opportunity and I wanted to do something about it.

That’s when the robots came in.

After doing some research, I learned about FIRST Robotics, a program that brings thousands of high school students together from across the world to test their engineering, programming, and critical-thinking skills. The more I researched, the more I realized FIRST—with its rule of gracious professionalism—combined all the benefits of athletics while giving students skills to succeed in an increasingly technological society.

So with the help of two other members of our school’s science department and grants from JCPenny and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, Team 4780 was created with 12 student members.

Just like with any sport, there was a natural learning curve. Few of us had any robotics experience, which made for more than a couple frustrating setbacks. Yet setback was followed by persistence and a willingness to learn from mistakes. The students turned into sponges. Soon enough, kids who had never touched a power tool were drilling through shatter-prone sheets of acrylic Plexiglas. They were glued to computers, playing virtual simulations and scouring YouTube to learn from videos other teams had posted.

After long nights spent teaching myself in an effort to stay ahead and mentor them, I realized that in order to meet our increasing demands, I needed to bring in outside resources.

The first came from NASA when their Glenn Research Center sent a volunteer to teach basic programming through Lego’s Mindstorms robotics kit. Encouraged by the experience, most students signed up for a post-secondary robotics course offered by a local community college. Next, we took a field trip to a General Motors plant to expose students to the careers they could achieve as engineers.

All of the buzz resulted in our team growing from a group of 12 to 10 percent of the entire student body. The buzz then turned into a roar. The whole school signed up for the Hour of Code, hosted by code.org, and was selected to video chat with Bill Gates. Students packed into my classroom to hear Gates talk about the importance of computer science, the opportunities it presents, and the characteristics needed to succeed. The students then wrote their first computer program, amazed at how accessible it was once they tried.

Within minutes of FIRST announcing the year’s challenge, the team was busy evaluating possible designs and collaborating on strategy. They calculated which parts they needed and where to buy them. They recognized potential bottlenecks for parts construction and planned how to multitask around them. They called businesses to fundraise and developed partnerships with local corporations and universities.

Then it was go time. Teams had traveled across the country with budgets four times our size, yet as our students looked around the competition, they knew they could compete. Quickly, Team 4780 began pitching their game strategy and preparing for practice rounds. The other teams and the judges were impressed with the robot our team had created with such a limited budget. Unfortunately, a few mechanical setbacks kept it from advancing, dashing the team’s hopes of traveling to St. Louis for the FIRST championships. Nevertheless, all the students recognized this as an opportunity to grow and kept a positive attitude as they scouted best practices of the teams that did advance.

Whatever the scoreboard, what we’ve created is something even better than athletics. Because while the NCAA states that 98 in 100 high school athletes will never play a collegiate sport, Dean Kamen, the founder of FIRST, has said that there is a technology job for every single participant of FIRST. The organziation even provides over $19 million in scholarships to help get them there. Robotics provides the same interpersonal skills that athletics does, but adds technical training for a career in science and technology. Because of this, I look forward to day when robotics receives the same attention sports can garner.

Trevor Sprague graduated from the University of Georgia where he earned his bachelors of science in Biology. He joined Teach For America as part of Northeast Ohio’s 2012 charter corps and currently teaches high school science.