Teens have an innate way of humbling adults. Ask them a question about social media, music, technology, sports, pop culture, the weather, food, their friends, their teachers, their lives — to name just a few topics that come to mind — and the sighs and eye rolls that precede what, to them, is the most obvious answer ever will leave you realizing just how much of an imbecile you are for asking.
I like to think their disdain isn’t malicious. It’s just difficult and tiresome when you know everything and you’re asked a question by someone who obviously doesn’t know anything.
Of course there are other times when, as an adult, you marvel at a teen’s omniscience and you don’t mind feeling like a complete goof.
Spend any time with students participating in the annual FIRST Robotics competition and once you’ve closed your mouth and regained your senses, you’ll realize just how brilliant these kids are.
And just how simple you are.
The FIRST competition is one of two that happens during the school year. The other, VEX, takes place typically during the fall while the FIRST competition is this weekend at Valley View Casino.
In both the objective is the same: teams of teens build working robots that will be used to compete against other schools’ robots in building, stacking or throwing objects.
Or, to put it in simple-enough- for-an-adult-to-understand: they build cool things.
Under the FIRST guidelines, teams have about three months to design, build and program a functioning robot while at the same time creating a “brand,” raising funds and generating publicity — in essence behaving like a mini technological start- up.
At Castle Park High School — one of five high schools from Sweetwater Union High School District competing in this weekend’s event — students were figuring out ways to create an arm that, when extended, would be has high as six feet while at the same time creating a base that would be stable enough to support the device and maximize mobility. They also toyed with the idea of incorporating sensors that allowed the robot to avoid objects when it was operating autonomously.
Of course there also was the task of combing through buggy software that temporarily hampered their efforts at developing a working joystick. Without the joystick there would be no way of operating the robot during the competition’s non-autonomous portion.
Over the course of mere weeks, metal, wires, laptops and what otherwise looks like junk to the untrained eye is assembled into the kinds of devices that NASA might one day use when they’re settling a colony on Mars.
Watching it all take shape is a humbling experience.
