Gatorbotics Then and Now: From Rookie of the Year to the Most Prestigious Award in FIRST Robotics
With a field as innovative as robotics, it’s hard to believe there was ever a time that could truly be classified as the “old days.”
However, former math teacher Kyle BarrigerHA, who retired after over 20 years in 2022, remembers them well. “Before there was Gatorbotics,” he explains, “there was something called Botball. It was Lego-based and strictly autonomous,” which means that the kids built it and left it to run on its own. “It was nothing like the competitions we know now."
After a couple of years of advising the Botball Team, in 2004 Mr. Barriger and Doris MouradHA, who taught chemistry at the time, were invited to a meeting with John Doerr, a Castilleja parent who believed strongly that school needed to move into FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics, a nonprofit global program founded to prepare students for a future in STEM. Mission-aligned with Castilleja, the program encouraged participants to collaborate, learn, and develop professionally while embracing concepts like innovation, inclusion, teamwork, and fun. Mr. Doerr fully funded the first year of the new program, and Castilleja students set to work designing, building, and programming an industrial-sized robot starting with a common set of materials. These robots needed student drivers to help them perform tasks, and throughout the competitions, team members made frequent adjustments to improve results.
The small inaugural team worked tirelessly. “It was a steep learning curve at the beginning,” Mr. Barriger remembers. “We had moved out of the broom closet and were working in the science project room by that time, but I was bringing in my own tools from home for the girls to use. All the hammers and screwdrivers in my house still say Team 1700 on the sides,” he says. Even so, that first year, Gatorbotics, also known as Team 1700, won the Rookie of the Year Award at a regional FIRST competition, which qualified them for Nationals, a noticeable accomplishment because at the time, robotics competitions were even more dominated by boys than they are now. “The Castilleja students learned more than just robotics at those early competitions," Mr. Barriger says. “No one believed they had built and could drive the robots. They learned how to go out there and insist on being taken seriously.”
The establishment of the Bourn Idea Lab in 2011, named in memory of the first Gatorbotics mentor, the beloved Doug Bourn, gave the team its first dedicated space. Soon enough, Castilleja shifted from having teachers who worked as part-time coaches to staffing the Bourn Lab and the Gatorbotics team with full-time professionals who specialized in designing, building, and coding. However, even as the setting and support system became more established and the team dove into competition head-on, one rule remained true from the beginning: the Gatorbotics coaches and mentors never, ever touched the robots. Now, almost two decades later, that rule remains steadfast, and Gatorbotics is still winning awards. On Saturday, March 9, and Sunday, March 10, the team competed in the 2024 San Francisco Regional at Saint Ignatius College Preparatory School.
The bleachers of the gymnasium were garnished with fans wearing a rainbow of different colored T-shirts, representing robotics teams and their supporters from all over the Bay Area.
This year’s theme was Crescendo, and the goals of the competition related to musical concepts. To score points, robots were required to deliver "musical notes" to speakers or amps and get on stage. These terms are not literal, of course. In this case, a “note” was a hollow plastic ring; “speakers” and “amps” were baskets that collected the rings; and ”getting on stage” was achieved when robots lifted themselves up by grabbing onto a chain. Bonus points were given to robots that “harmonized” by grabbing the same chain as another robot. Once robots pulled themselves up to the stage, they had additional opportunities to score points together.
The first match began, and without explanation, "Dino-Mike," Team 1700’s robot, would not budge. Anyone who has ever participated in a robotics competition knows that trial and error is part of the process, so the team was undaunted. They returned to the pits, a giant room where all teams set up shop, to troubleshoot. That’s when they realized that certain annotations in their code, meant to be skipped by the C/C++ LabVIEW interpreter, had not been skipped and this affected the robot’s performance. The team intrepidly adjusted the coding error. Dino-Mike moved freely and was capable of carrying “notes” by the next match.
Even with a rocky start, after completing a total of ten matches, Gatorbotics ranked 15th out of 43 teams, but the placement was only part of the glory. The bigger accomplishment was winning the IMPACT Award, the most prestigious award in FIRST Robotics. In their announcement, competition officials noted, “This team creates an expanding curriculum for youth STEM education, spearheaded engineering programs at their school, and bridges communities across the peninsula and in the world.”
The team truly deserves this honor. Since 2019, they have created an accessible, low-cost curriculum and taught classes to over 900 students, with a focus on girls, students of color, and students in under-resourced schools. They are also currently forging a partnership with WAAW, which empowers African women to become leaders in STEM.
The win qualifies the team to travel to the World Championships in April for the third year in a row. While preparing for this next phase of competition this year, Nico Gallo, Castilleja's Robotics Advisor and Bourn Idea Lab Faculty member, is also thinking long-term. “Our team did really, really well in the competition, which was the result of years of taking technical risks and diligent problem-solving. I'm super excited about the number of freshmen and new members on the team, and can't wait to see how they develop into the next generation of Gatorbotics leaders.”
In the shorter term, he invites the entire Castilleja community to track the rest of Team 1700’s stellar season. Click on this link to follow along!