Marin Independent Journal.
Adrian Rodriguez.
March 24, 2016.
Sona Dolasia, a junior at Tamalpais High School, has an affinity for robotics.
“I’ve always been interested in puzzles,” the 16-year-old from Mill Valley said. “It’s about being able to problem solve and creating and building,” she said, adding that “this technology is the future.”
To stay ahead of the game, Dolasia founded Reaching Out With Robotics, a STEM program where she and a group of seven teen mentors teach middle schoolers how to program semi-autonomous machines. On Tuesday, the volunteer group sponsored a competition at Bayside Martin Luther King Jr. Academy where 25 students from the Marin City school and from Mill Valley Middle School pitted their unique robot designs against each other in five challenges that tested the programer’s precision and innovation.
Dolasia, who was introduced to robotics as a seventh-grader in the Mill Valley Middle School Robotics Club, designed a second-place winner in the Best of Show category at the ROBOGames, the Olympics of robots, when she was in eighth grade. The robot named “Hugo’ was programed to write its own name with a pen.
“It was the first robot I built on my own, without a team,” she said. “I was really proud of it, and that’s something I wanted to share.”
Inspired by her own achievement, Dolasia formed the Tam High Robotics Club, whose members make up the mentors in Reaching Out.
Bayside didn’t have a robotics club, but had LEGO robots and the software to program them. Dolasia pitched the club to the school two years ago.
“I was impressed by the curriculum she developed,” said Susan Cassidy, Bayside’s middle school math and science teacher, and sponsoring teacher for the program. “It was so involved and she has great leadership. Sona is just wonderful.”
STEM, which stands for “science, technology, engineering, math,” is a growing trend in education, which Dolasia said, “gives us an edge to get into that sort of market.” Not to mention, “it’s fun,” she said.
The fun was evident at the competition. The student programmers milled about the gym, tinkering with their bots, hooking them up to computers to fine tune gears and setting them off on test runs before the games began.
The first challenge was the tube push, where the bulldozer-like bots, most of them with widespread claws for a bumper, drove through a maze collecting cardboard tubes.
When 10-year-old Ruben Palomares saw his robot speed through the course gathering four tubes, he cheered.
“I was thinking I was going to get five,” the Bayside fourth-grader said excitedly. “Yesterday when we were doing testing I got five.”
The sumo competition was the crowd favorite. Josh Holzer, 14, and Jason Schoenmann, 12, faced off in a three-round battle as the crowd of 40 children and parents circled the makeshift arena.
Jason’s robot named “SwagBot 2k16” featured a large ramp at the front that quickly scooped up and flipped Holzer’s unnamed machine, winning two out of the three rounds.
“I watched a few sumo videos before and the one with the ramp usually won,” Jason said. The Mill Valley seventh-grader said he had built some prototypes before, as did Josh, totalling in more than eight hours of work.
Josh said he enjoyed being in the robotics club because it was different than an average classroom experience.
“It’s a better use of your head,” the Mill Valley eighth-grader said. “You see what works, what doesn’t and you problem solve until you fix it.”
Competitor Lourenco Pereira, 11, said he had a background in coding already, which made the decision to join the robotics club easy. Lourenco made a robot for the line-follow competition, where the machine uses a laser light to navigate a squiggly line.
“We plug them into the computers before to make sure the gears are calibrated correctly, and each time you test it you get a newer and better robot,” the Bayside sixth-grader said.
Dolasia said the event was practice for this year’s ROBOGames, which takes place in Alameda in April. But really, “I like watching them, seeing what they built in action and how proud they are,” Dolasia said. “It’s nice to see that.”
Dolasia and the teen mentors also host workshops at the Mill Valley Public Library and at the Belvedere-Tiburon Library. For more information, go to reachingoutwithrobotics.com.
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