In a normal school year, there would be more than 30 active clubs ongoing throughout the year, but due to COVID-19, there are only a handful of these clubs that are still meeting. The robotics team is one of the few that have been meeting consistently. Although the pandemic created some initial struggles for the team, they are still working toward their now-online competition goals.

  “The pandemic has made an impact on a lot of things. It’s kind of a building year for us and so we’re doing everything kind of remote or virtual and so there is no face-to-face competition, which kind of puts a damper on it, but for the first robotics kids, they’re all in it. We’re building a robot from the ground up and trying to use some of the concepts we’ve learned last year and the years before to strengthen our team,” STEM teacher and Robotics advisor Mark Skodack said. 

  In order to work around the pandemic, the team started online and moved face to face once it was safe to do so. Since then they have been taking measures to remain safe.

  “We’re being really careful. We’re taking our temperature every day and we wear our masks,” junior Chloe Ricker said. 

  The students have also limited the number of people working on the robot at any given time as well to maintain a safe environment.

  “There are a lot less people around the robot at any given time. We used to have five people working on the same part and now we can only have two,” junior Owen Hansen said.

  Despite the students having a later start in the year, the team leaders did their best to ensure everything was organized and ready to go for when they could start meeting face to face again.

  “In the beginning, it was very difficult [to meet because] there’s not much we can accomplish virtually. But with the team leaders, they were pretty persistent and they wanted to get some stuff out, get some goals established so that when we did get back to face to face, everybody would know what to do,” Skodack said. 

  New COVID protocols are not the only new changes to the club this year. While students have needed to take more precautions, the club has significantly shrunk.

  “There is VEX robotics which is smaller robots and smaller individual teams. This year we only had one team which was myself and another student. In a normal year we would have 15-20 kids with three to five teams,” captain of the team, Makenzie Womack said. “In a normal year, we would start meeting at the start of the year and then start competitions around October. Normally we would meet three times a week, and more if necessary depending on [the] competition this year we have only been able to consistently meet once a week due to lack of mentors.”

  Despite the setbacks, the students have used the pandemic as an opportunity to work on building and strengthening the team they have rather than continuing with a smaller, less available group.