Rookie Robotics Team from Small UWS High School Joining the Giants in Robotics Competition

By Lisa Kava

Students from the newly formed robotics team at West End Secondary School (WESS), on West 61st Street, are competing in the New York City regionals of the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) from April 5-7. The event will take place at the Armory Track and Field Center in Washington Heights.

Founded in 2015, WESS has 500 students in its public high school. How did its novice robotics team secure a spot at FRC, alongside larger, well-established schools known for their STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) programs, such as The Bronx High School of Science and Stuyvesant HIgh School? 

The story starts in September 2023 when Upper West Sider Sonia Benowitz, 14, entered 9th grade at WESS. She had loved building LEGO robots in WESS’s middle school robotics club, “the community of the club and working with friends towards a common goal,” she told West Side Rag in a phone interview. But a club did not exist for high school students. So she created one. 

First, she approached her school principal who was supportive, she said. Benowitz then asked her middle school robotics coach, Noah Tom-Wong, to help run the club. Together with math teacher Evan Wheeler, who signed on as faculty leader, they began to spread the word. Soon the club had 25 members from 9th through 12th grade. 

With Tom-Wong’s guidance, the club members gathered wood, metal, and other supplies, ordering from vendors and robotics companies. They began to build a fully functional robot that could perform various tasks through remote wireless control. “For example, one task is that the robot will use its arms that we built to pick up disks shaped like frisbees,”  Benowitz said, “then throw the disks into a goal area.”

Tom-Wong suggested the club enter the FIRST Robotics Competition, in which he had competed as a student at Stuyvesant High School. He volunteers frequently at FRC competitions. “Robotics provides students [with] an incredibly unique environment where they can exert energy safely and with great impact,” he told the Rag. “The nature of the competition not only makes students good at STEM, but also [at] STEM communication.” 

But the $6,000 registration fee for the competition was not in the school budget. That’s when Samantha Alvarez Benowitz, Sonia’s mom, got involved. Researching, she learned about a “rookie grant” from NASA through it’s Robotics Alliance Project. The WESS team applied and got it. According to Alvarez Benowitz, they were the only school in New York City selected to receive the NASA grant, and one of five schools in New York state, 

“On the application we had to describe who was on our team, so I did a demographic survey and found that close to 70% of our team members are from historically underrepresented groups in STEM, including women, people of color, LGBTQ+, and students with disabilities,” Sonia Benowitz said. “They also wanted to know how we would get and pay for the supplies we needed to build the robot.” The team has been fundraising through bake sales and other school functions. They also applied for grants, receiving $2,500 from the Gene Hass Foundation, an automotive company that sponsors STEM education. 

At the competition the WESS team will be paired with two other teams to form a three-team alliance. “Each team has its own robot which will be programmed to perform different tasks. The robots are judged and awarded points. We have to prepare our robot to complete as many tasks as possible, but also to complete tasks as well as possible,” Benowitz explained. “The WESS robot has been programmed to drive up a ramp onto a platform, like a car on a road,” Alvarez Benowitz added. The ramp and platform are part of an existing set that all the teams use. 

Working collaboratively is crucial, according to Tom-Wong. “The work that comes out of these robotics teams can be very complex,” he said. “It’s not unusual at competitions to see students from multiple teams working together to fix one team’s problem.” The top five teams will compete in the championships in Houston at the end of April.

Benowitz is excited about the competition. “Our team has been working towards this moment for months, and we have all put in a lot of time and effort to get here.” She is also a little nervous. “I hope that our robot won’t have any problems or break in the middle of a match.” 

Tom-Wong credits the rookie team for its perseverance. “The group had to work with less stock and fewer tools [than most teams]. We also do not have the experience that the veteran teams have,” he told the Rag. He is hopeful that  WESS students will remain active in robotics in future years. “Ultimately this group is unique in that they are pioneering the robotics program at WESS. They are laying the groundwork for a place where students can push themselves to learn and develop.”

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