Gio

"I never thought I'd be a captain of a robotics team."

By Students of NYC

March 1^st, 2024

"When I was young, I used to break open all my toys. The electronic ones with all the pieces in them, the little computers and phones for kids, anything with buttons — I always liked seeing the mechanisms inside and checking how it worked. I’d always ask my parents, how does this work? How does that work? That was always my question.

When we started off the the first competition, the First Tech Challenge, it was all of our first time doing robotics. When they first announced the challenge, everyone around us was excited. These teams had been at it for years. And we were like, what? How are we supposed to do this? Our first qualifiers, we failed. We were so disappointed. We’d worked so hard, and we couldn’t even make it. Then, we lost the second qualifier, and we thought we were out. Usually, a team only gets two tries. But then another team actually dropped out and we were up next, so we had another chance. And that day, we didn’t lose one match. We won every single one. At the competitions, you have to pick alliances. Nobody wanted to pick us in the beginning. But then all of a sudden, we lost zero matches. We were number one, and everybody wanted to be with us then.

We went into this whole thing without experience, but each qualifier we went to, we learned from. Oh, we can do this next time, we could do that next time. And that’s what confirmed for me: These failures, these falls, they are important. That’s where you learn. Over time, I’ve been losing my fear of failing. The fear of the unknown. That day when we found out we won, you should have heard us screaming. By the time I got home, my voice was gone.

Now we are going to the city championship to compete against all the teams in New York City who have qualified. It’s our same robot, but each time we make it better. It started off as just a chassis. We turned it into an octopus, that’s our theme: roboctopus. As part of the challenge, it has to hang. I actually designed a tentacle and connected it to the hanging mechanism. We have 3D printing, laser cutting, all this stuff we’ve never used before — we have learned all of it. Every Wednesday we go to the STEM center in Cornell on Roosevelt Island, and that’s where we work and learn.

I never thought I’d be the captain of the robotics team. To be honest, I’ve never really seen myself as a leader. I mean, I have siblings who I love and help with anything. But a captain of a team? Robotics? At first, I wasn’t going to do it. But in my head I thought, I need to take these risks. I’d always be the quiet one, always overthinking, should I do this? Should I not do this? But that day I was like, you know what? Let’s just take the risk. Let’s see where it takes me. If anything, I’ll learn along the journey with my fellow students. And now, I call them my familia. They call me El Capitan. I always try to brighten up the mood and be happy. Some of them are freshman, and it’s their first year in high school. That’s a hard transition. I wanted them to feel comfortable, welcomed. I feel like it’s my job to make everybody feel heard and that they have a part."