By JULIE LAM
Among many clubs and opportunities for Malden High School students to be involved with their community, there lies a small and tightly knit club that share their passion for programming: the Robotics Club of MHS.
The Robotics Club originated around 2012 and slowly grew throughout the years. The MHS Robotics Club consists of around eight members who are truly dedicated to the club. Throughout the year, the members of the club stay after school several times a week with their advisor and physics teacher Brian Morrison and technology education teacher Chris Bazzinotti to work on their latest projects.
After finishing their projects, the members compete in the Botball competition, which involves middle and high school all around Massachusetts, where they can gather and show their new inventions to others.
Last year, MHS the robotics team placed sixth out of twenty-four in the Botball competition. However, because of all their hard work, the brilliant members of the club placed fourth this year. Although fourth place was a great turn out for the club, they did not forget about how much work they put into their final product.
The members worked hard, especially “during the weeks prior to [their] competition, [when they] had meetings everyday after school for a few hours. Some weekends [they came] in to work on the robot as well,” revealed MHS senior Nidal Hishmeh. Their hard work was persistent because “[they] do whatever it takes, whether that means taking time after school, or taking time from [their] vacations, or even waking up in the middle of the night on a Saturday to loudly announce a new idea to [their] neighbors,” responded senior co-president Ivan Chen.
One of their greatest accomplishments includes knocking Medford out of the competition twice. Another accomplishment includes senior co-presidents Chen and Wesley Liao’s success on their Roomba vacuum robot. After the Botball, which occurred on Apr. 12, 2014, the club has been very low key due to upcoming AP exams.
Some of their goals for next year includes “[planting] the flag of [MHS] in each and every one of our vanquished enemies.” With that in mind, the seniors are very confident that the selected juniors will bring home the win and represent the MHS Robotics Clubs well.
As the year slowly comes to an end, another future goal for the MHS Robotics Club includes winning the New England Regional Botball Tournament and being involved in more tournaments like Botball.
Co-president Liao expressed that one of the unique traits about this club is that “programming robots requires a lot of coordinated work.” The Robotics Club encourages new members to join, ones that would like to improve their time-management and team-work skills.
As the Robotics Club members finished recruiting their new representatives, Chen concluded that “after [their] Robotics version of American Idol was over, [they] added two new juniors to the crew, [Eugine Szeto and Jonathan Ye], who will be leading the charge into next year’s competition.”
