Around Town: Robotics champs and an annual festival turned green
In this week’s Around Town column, an underdog story and a green festival.
FEEL THE LOVE … Now in its third year, the annual Love Our Earth Festival is planned for April 13 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Bloomhouse in East Palo Alto. The event is free and aims to educate the public on how to take effective climate action. This year’s theme is “Go Electric to Build Healthy and Resilient Communities,” and will feature a home electrification showcase, a clean vehicle expo and other demonstrations sponsored by the cities of Menlo Park and East Palo Alto and other community partners. Attendees are encouraged to walk, bike or take public transit to the event; registration is online at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/love-our-earth-festival-tickets-785315950147?aff=oddtdtcreator.
UNDERDOGS TO CHAMPIONS … After an intense three days of gritty teamwork, Gunn’s Robotics Team (GRT) won the recently held First Robotics regional competition in Boise, Idaho. The competition took place on March 21-23. It was quite the rollercoaster. The 50 member team, comprising mostly juniors and seniors, as well as some sophomores, were ranked very low in the initial phase of the competition. Of the 44 teams that participated, they were initially ranked 43rd, but they emerged victorious by the end of it. “Going in we had a lot of issues with our robot. On the first day everything just started to go downhill,” said 17-year old Parker Harrington, who is a junior at Gunn High School and a member of the robotics team. “But we kept working on the robot and really tried to work things out — and eventually we did!” The next step for the exuberant team is a chance to compete in the upcoming world championships in Houston, Texas. “The interesting thing is that I don’t think any one of us thought that we were going to win until we actually won,” said Harrington, who, along with his teammates comes away from the experience with more than just wiring and coding related lessons. “You should never give up. There were a lot times there when we felt like giving up,” he said. Things got particularly tense for the team when they got together to watch recorded clips of their performance to analyze their work and figure out what went wrong. “We really worked on slowing it down, looking through everything and saying — ‘Hey, we’re not trying to blame anything on anyone; we want to make this better’,” Harrington said. “It’s about taking a step back, taking a deep breath and seeing ‘What went wrong and how can we improve this?’ And in the end, you know, everyone improves.” The team is now busy gearing up for the next competition by making changes to the mechanisms of the robot, in a move to increase its reliability. Balancing school work with robotics is something the team has become adept at doing. “We really love what we do,” he said. “We’re really passionate about it.”
