Help Students Learn About Robotics
Ygnacio Valley High School’s robotics team in Concord needs mentors. You can make a huge difference in the lives of some really great kids — even if you’re not a robotics expert.
Why?
• Be the reason a student finishes high school, or goes to college, or likes learning
• Advance your own skills in EE, MechE, software, or project management
• Playing with robots is fun!
What qualifications do I need?
• No robotics or engineering knowledge required! If you’re able to circulate and help keep the students focused, or tell them where to put tools away, or remind them to wear their goggles in the lab, or figure out who isn’t asking for help they need, that’s valuable. If you’re good with project management, even better. Of course, if you want to learn about robotics so you can mentor more, we’re happy to teach you!
• Some availability 3:45pm-6pm on weekdays. We suspect this will be the sticking point for most people. See “What’s Involved” below for details.
• Reliability and communication. If you pride yourself on doing what you say you will, and on letting others know in advance when you won’t be able to deliver (because it happens to everyone), you’ll be a huge help to our understaffed team!
More Info
FIRST (“For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology”, www.firstinspires.org) promotes STEM education by sponsoring robotics competitions at several levels, culminating with the First Robotics Competition (FRC) for high school students.
YVHS created an FRC team, named Project 212, in 2018. We lost some institutional knowledge with the pandemic, but gained another mentor in 2022. Now our founding mentor is moving out of state, and our new mentor needs some help.
The FRC season involves teaching students engineering principles, lab safety, proper use of power tools, and many other skills from September through December. In early January, the rules for the new year’s competition are announced. Robots will compete in a
game with new rules, completely different from the previous year. In only 6-8 weeks, each team will figure out a game strategy, figure out how to build a robot to implement that strategy, program and debug their robot, and then compete against other teams. The robots
are entirely student-designed and student-built: Mentors only advise – we aren’t allowed to build, repair, program, or design any robots that compete. It’s impressive and inspirational to watch students take on that challenging timeline and build robots that work!
What’s involved?
• Project 212 meets after school Mondays and Fridays from 3:45pm-6pm (ish). It would be great if you could generally attend at least twice a month. (Arriving late or leaving early is fine.)
• During the “build season” (January through March), we also meet after school on Wednesdays, and also for 8 hours on Saturdays. You aren’t expected to be there every Saturday start to finish, but it’s valuable if you can show up more to help.
• Not required, but fun: Attend competitions with the students and cheer like crazy! (And, yes, help with team logistics.)
Sounds great! How do I get more info?
Please note: This is not a Berkeley Lab hosted program but through a third party (Ygnacio Valley HS). Please email Alyssa Brand at abrand@lbl.gov or lead mentor Jon Solera at jon@emufarm.org and learn more!
Be a mentor — make a difference
