Robots created by San Benito Robotics, a newly formed youth organization, will be invading the Hollister High campus on April 15 but have no fear: this is not the beginning of Terminator 7. These robots will be fully under the control of their human masters. Except for maybe Titan, the one built by nine-year-old Jaden Hernandez and his team.
“I think of Titan as my son,” Hernandez said. “But he is like a teenage boy and sometimes, when we try to make him go through a course, he just doesn’t listen at all. Sometimes, when we put in the exact coding, he just messes up on purpose!”
Hernandez, along with Team Titan members Giselle Crispin, Olivia Redmond and Ethan Redmond and the rest of the San Benito Robotics teams, will be showing off their skills to the public on Robotics Community Day on April 15. They will make Lego-based machines do their bidding in a series of simple tasks developed by the FIRST Lego League, a worldwide program that introduces children from nine to 16 to critical thinking, coding and design skills.
“The FIRST Lego League utilizes robotic kits in a curriculum that teaches the kids how to build robots and program them,” said Christopher Dunn, co-director of San Benito Robotics. “It uses a brain that Lego created to work with regular Lego pieces that come in a pre-packaged kit. Their job is to create robots that will be able to interact in specific ways with a fixed playing field.”
The robots can be programmed to move along a specific path and make choices through information collected by touch, sound and color sensors. Different Lego pieces can have different functions and can be programmed and controlled by iPads.
“The kids are learning how to utilize each of the different components and ideas,” Dunn said. “Then, when they are given a task to do, they can put all those different pieces together to build a robot that does those particular things.”
During the Robotics Community Day presentations, the current Lego League teams will be competing for four awards, which will be judged on the same standards used in regular Lego League events. Deep Space 6884, the Hollister High School robotics team, will also be attending, showing off their robot, Cosmic Debris, which is capable of much more complicated functions.
“The Lego League kids will be doing demonstrations of robots pre-programmed to do tasks,” he said. “But for robots designed by the middle and upper tier students, those are manually controlled, so people will have stick time and be able to drive them around”
It has only been five months since the creation of San Benito Robotics and the object of the event is to spread awareness of the robotics programs and register new members and as well as raise much-needed funds for more equipment and scholarships for members of the community who otherwise couldn’t afford a registration fee.
Founded initially to focus on just the Lego League, the youngest age group of robot enthusiasts, with the assistance of Hollister High robotics team coach, Thien Vu-Nguyen, it has now expanded to include Hollister High School robotics students, some of whom serve as teen mentors, supervising and guiding each team. However, Dunn wants to expand the program further.
“We’ve got the elementary section and the high school team,” he said, “but there’s really nothing of this kind of middle school, so there is nothing currently to create a pipeline from there into the high school programs. We are going to have signups on Saturday and we hope to get enough interest so we can ask middle schools, ‘How do we get this going?’ because a lot of students want it.”
The event is being held at the Hollister High School Robotics Building at the corner of Nash Road and River Parkway and will run from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., Saturday, April 15.
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