Wellesley High robotics team teaching campers more than technical skills
The Wellesley High School robotics team, called Team Ultraviolet, held its first of three summer workshops earlier this summer at the former Upham Elementary School building. The workshops are a five-day, summer-camp-like program open to third through sixth graders. The kids spend the week building mini rovers, which are battery powered and equipped with real electronic parts.
The camp is run almost entirely by high school volunteers on the WHS robotics team. Throughout the week, volunteers present the kids with intentionally hard challenges, such as programming their rovers to navigate through mazes, to dance, or to play hot potato. The kids work in teams to solve the problems.
Sessions have high volunteer-to-camper ratios, with some as low as six campers to 12 volunteers. Larger sessions can have more than 15 campers but maintain high ratios to give the kids personalized support. Stephanie Xia, the camp’s administrative captain, is a rising WHS senior who co-founded the workshops in 2023.
“We’re not just teaching them the technical skills of how to build a robot, but also the kind of problem solving and collaborative thinking that will really help them in whatever they choose to do in the future, even if it’s not in robotics,“ Xia said.
On the last day of camp, the kids get the opportunity to meet and operate Team Ultraviolet’s robot, a 120-pound bot the size of a minifridge and three times heavier. The kids use Xbox controllers to drive the robot, which picks up foam rings and shoots them into the air. The kids got a kick out of catching the rings once the robot threw them.
“Every activity has a concept that we want the kids to learn, like loops, variables, basic movement. And then when they meet the big robot, it shows them that all this they’ve been doing with their rover kits…can all come into something as impressive as this,” Neha Guruprasad, the camp’s Impact Lead, said.
The team’s robot, named C# after the programming language and the musical pitch, was built for their annual competition. The team, a school club at WHS, typically trains its members from September to December. Members build their robot from January to March, then compete with the robot from mid-March to June. Their yearly robot is required to perform specific tasks to coincide with the competition theme, which is released in January. This past year, the team made it past the preliminary competitions and advanced to the District Championships.
All of this is expensive. Robot motors are individually $400 each, and combined with the expenses of other parts, the robot’s components can easily total thousands. Steep competition entry fees can also reach multiple thousands of dollars.
Because robotics everywhere is an expensive activity, it isn’t uncommon for robotics teams to charge prospective members hundreds of dollars in sign-up fees. Team Ultraviolet is fiercely against this in order to create an accessible environment available to anyone with an interest in STEM. Instead, Wellesley’s team finds more creative means of raising the necessary funds, including hosting these summer workshops.
“While these workshops are a big source of funding for us, that’s a side benefit. We’re really just here to spread STEM, robotics, and soft skills like that that robotics has to offer to the children,” Guruprasad said. “We offer full scholarships for this camp to kids who need it, because really it’s not about the money. It’s more about filling up the workshops and getting kids to collaborate.”
The team will host two more workshop sessions in July and August, both of which still have availability, and plans to continue hosting summer workshops in years to come.
“In terms of the future of the workshops, one thing we want to do is expand our age range. It’s always really unfortunate when there are kids interested in STEM who are either too young or too old for our workshops,” Xia said. “Also, we teach a similar curriculum every time with slight modifications. So next year we might work on expanding to have some other, varied curriculums. We are looking to do bigger and better things with the workshops next year, which is super exciting.”