While many high school students are busy making a name for themselves in their classrooms or on the athletic field, the students in David Stout’s lab are busy making their names in the area of robotics, building the next generation of artificial intelligence.
Stout is the coach of the Culver City High School Robotics Team, which, last year, had 50 students. As part of the team, Stout said that students learn how to use a variety of tools in the construction of their robots as well as how to demonstrate the functions of the robots they produce.
“The team learns how to use all kinds of tools, both hand and power tools such as a table saw, milling machine, and lathe,” Stout said. “We also have people learning computer-aided design (CAD), fundraising activities, and demonstration events (at local schools, fleet week, with other teams). Off-season they work on projects such as the JPL Invention challenge, revising and improving last year’s robot, and building a demonstration robot. During the season, they have to design and build the robot, all the field pieces to practice with, code the robot to do some functions autonomously using a variety of sensors and get good at competition strategies.”
All of that training paid off as the team achieved a milestone winning their first regional competition last year, earning trophies for the “Innovation in Control” category for programming their robot to autonomously know where it was located, find certain game pieces, and put them where they belonged.
Stout said his team is known as a FIRST Robotics FRC team which means that his team competes annually at the FIRST Robotics Competition, a national engineering contest that teams the students with engineers from businesses, universities, and research institutions to build game-playing robots that can complete tasks such as scoring balls into goals, flying discs into goals, inner tubes onto racks, hanging on bars, and balancing robots on balance beams.
“Every year we get a new challenge on the first Saturday of January, and have about two months to design, prototype, build, break, test, and program a built-from-scratch robot to compete in regional tournaments,” Stout said. “Last year we won our first tournament ever in the 19-year history of the team, and went to the world championships in Houston.”
In addition to the FIRST Robotics Competition, Stout has focused a lot of his coaching energy on the JPL Invention Challenge. Sponsored by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, the Challenge is billed as a friendly competition open to JPL employees and contractors, their family members, and students from southern California middle and high schools. Each year a new engineering challenge is presented to the participants.
Last year’s challenge was the Upright Pipe Contest where challengers had to create a device that could position a plastic pipe resting on two support stands into a vertical position atop a small platform in under 60 seconds.
So how does a student become a member of the robotics club?
Stout said that any CCHS student or Culver City Middle School eighth-grader can join. Members must adhere to a code of conduct contract as well as a liability waiver that team members and their parents must sign.
“We work with tools that can be very dangerous if mishandled, so we need students to be serious, act safely and be responsible when using tools,” Stout said. “They also are expected to help clean up after activities and contribute to the success of the team.”
Once on the team, students find that their experiences with learning the ins and outs of robotics can often help them in other areas of their academic career. On numerous occasions, Stout has seen students hanging out after school and helping each other with homework.
The CCHS Robotics Team was established in 2001 by one of the teachers at the high school and current senior mentor Alfredo Alvear. Two years ago Stout, a retired UCLA professor of biomedical physics, was asked by the school’s principal to lead the team. Since taking over as
coach, Stout has spent 20 to 30 hours offseason and 40 to 60 hours during the season either working on robotics activities or in the room with the team.
“I spent 26 years there [at UCLA] teaching thousands of people how to design and conduct medical research experiments, designed and built an imaging center and ran the cyclotron (particle accelerator), radiochemistry and imaging facility,” Stout said. “As part of my work, I designed and used a machine shop to create various devices and robots, and enjoy creating things still using the 3D print in my garage.”
Of the students he has coached, many of them go on to pursue degrees in STEM fields and some even continue their interest in robotics.
“For the two years I’ve been coach, all of the graduating team members have gone to college,” Stout said. “Many of the top students at CCHS are in robotics, including this year’s valedictorian and salutatorian.”
Although the work can be challenging and the competition fierce, Stout believes that he has created a home for students who are often spending large portions of time working on their robotic creations.
“Robotics is a place for these students to hang out together, in a safe, constructive and encouraging environment,” Stout said. “It is often one of the first times parents let their kids routinely be gone for long hours from home and their oversight, so I take it seriously to look out for the students, help the parents know what’s going on and encourage creative thought and actions. Without any shop classes anymore, robotics is the last place where kids can learn how to make things they dream up, with their own hands.”
For more information on the Culver City High School Robotics Team, please visit www.team702robotics.com.
For more information on the FIRST Robotics Competition, please visit www.firstinspires.org/robotics/frc