Robotics club shows East St. Louis students new opportunities for careers in STEM

In a technology room off the side of the library in East St. Louis Senior High School, members of one of the school’s newest clubs showcase their pride and joy: one of the two robots they built, coded and competed with throughout their first year.

Before driving the robot around the room and showing off all it can do, junior Cheyniece Carter and freshman Camille Jethro point to the various components of the gadget and how it works on the competition field, from its arm and claw that picks up small hexagonal game pieces called “pixels” to a “drone shooter” that shoots out a paper plane to different marks on the field.

“This sparkly number is our team number. This is what they use to help identify us as a team. This and also the name of our team: Skyline Robotics,” Cheyniece explained.

George Mitchom, a software engineering manager at Bayer, is head coach of Skyline Robotics, which he started alongside Technology Integration Specialist Jill Pisarek-Fox and other District 189 staff.

Mitchom has been a volunteer for FIRST Robotics, an international youth robotics community, for 10 years and coaches two Girl Scouts teams. He said he wanted to create a team at the high school to give back to his hometown and to provide an opportunity for East St. Louis students to engage with science, technology, engineering and math — often abbreviated as STEM — through robotics.

“What we’re trying to do with Girl Scouts and here at East Side is really try to help make a dent in the representation in STEM careers,” Mitchom said.

“When you look at the numbers, they’re still really low for women who are participating in engineering careers, especially Black women.”

According to the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, while women make up 51% of the U.S. population, only 35% of the STEM workforce are women. That number shrinks to just 2% for Black women.

Those statistics have propelled Mitchom and others to help people who are under-represented in the field get early exposure through robotics — which encompasses mechanical and electrical engineering, computer science and design — with the hopes that they then go on to pursue some type of STEM degree in college.

Camille has been doing robotics since sixth grade, so when she heard that a robotics team was being started, she thought it would be good practice for coding and software development.

“I like dealing with technology. It’s something that I want to do in life. I want to do cybersecurity,” she said.

Likewise for junior Trinity McNeely, Skyline Robotics offered her an opportunity to get back into STEM after she participated in a STEM challenge at the high school last year. The club also allows her to gain the coding and technological skills for the career she wants to go into: video game design.

Robotics and technology is a new venture, however, for Cheyniece, who is an artist. She designed the Skyline Robotics logo.

“I really like this club because it’s not just about the robotic, technological aspect of it,” Cheyniece said. “It also helps me be able to express myself and my creative side in ways I didn’t think I could.”

The team reflected on the highlights of their first season, including how it brought them together and allowed them to step out of their comfort zones and grow as individuals and teammates.

“We’re like a family now, and this is our communal baby,” Trinity said, gesturing toward the team’s robot.

“I really like building robots. It’s complicated. It’s got its ups and downs, but that’s what it’s about,” freshman Yolando Jones said.

The season consists of four competitions, three divisional and then the state qualifier, Mitchom explained. There are five meets at each competition.

Teams compete on a field that is 12 feet by 12 feet with robots that cannot be bigger than 18 inches in length, width or height.

During a meet, four teams are competing on the field at once: two teams against two others. Each team member takes on a specific role like building, coding, driving and coaching.

At the beginning of the season each fall, FIRST Robotics releases the new “game” with different scoring opportunities, and teams have to build their robots to score points and navigate within the constraints of the field.

This year, for example, there was a barrier across the entire center of the field, so teams had to build a “destroyer robot,” Mitchom said. Teams scored by picking up “pixels” with their robot on one end of the field, traversing across the field and then scoring on an angled board.

Among the challenges the team learned to overcome was “diagnosing” their robot at competitions. Cheyniece said that means identifying what is wrong with the robot when it malfunctions — which could be anything from a coding error to a loose screw — and fixing it quickly.

“It’s definitely a lot of pressure dealing with that,” she said.

Camille said that if something went wrong in one of the five meets on a competition day, the team would have to diagnose and fix the issue before their next meet.

“You have basically very little time to fix something that went wrong,” she said. “One of our competitions we had a coding problem, and it was very stressful because we could not get it to work. I was panicking. I kept trying everything.”

She recounted that at the last competition, the team’s robot didn’t fit within the 18-inch size limit for the first time in the season, and the members had to make fast adjustments.

Resizing, however, changed the whole code, so the team had to go into the different sets of code and work to remedy the issue.

“It was just a bunch of trial and error. But at the end of the day, the team is what supported me when I was struggling and trying to figure it out,” Camille said.

Looking to the next season, the team aims to increase its outreach efforts, recruit more members and compete at the state and national championships.

This year, Skyline Robotics didn’t make it to the state championship because the team had to miss its third competition of the season in Granite City on Jan. 13 due to the dangerous Arctic chill that swept across the area. Missing that third competition put the team at a disadvantage at the state qualifier, Mitchom said.

The team did, however, get to showcase its talents at the state level this year when it came in first place for robotics at the Illinois State Beta Competition.

Mitchom added that another goal for next year is to connect the team with professionals from the STEM field for mentorship.

In his own reflection of the team’s first season, he said “it exceeded my expectations.”

Pisarek-Fox echoed that sentiment.

“Just to see the growth that they have and how much they’ve come from just since the beginning of the year … it’s unreal, and that’s my why,” she said.

“These young people right here, this is the driving force, and they are the future.”