This year is the 10th anniversary of the upper school robotics team. The team has changed throughout the years, from student participation, to procedures, and competitions to the space where they work. The team has had many successes as well as faced a good deal of challenges. From the creation of the team, to the present, there have been many dedicated students and mentors who have been a part of this group.

Alex Monte-Sano,  a former economics teacher at Greenhills, took on the role as lead mentor when he founded the team.

“We [the team] started in the fall of 2014, 10 years ago,” said Monte-Sano. “At the same time, Mrs. Gleason, who was the eighth grade science teacher, before Dr. Dershimer, was starting a middle school team and she came to me and said, you should start a high school team at the same time. We started that fall getting ready for the competition season in January.”

In the team’s early years, mentors mainly determined the course of meetings, and what was done on the team. 

“Mr. Monte-Sano had noticed that when students stepped into robotics, they had never done robotics before, and so it was up to the adults to act mostly as mentors and chaperones to what happened,” said Charles Dershimer, the robotics program coordinator, and mentor.

The team progressively started to become more independent, relying more on its members than mentors. 

“The first year was really just trying to figure out what was happening,” said Monte-Sano. “The second year the robot was more adult designed, and then executed by students and adults together, and the third year was similar to that. Then the fourth year was really the first year where students took over the design process to a large degree. Since then, it’s been very student driven, and my impression is that that spirit remains today.”

In recent years, especially this year, the robotics team has had a lot more student leadership from committed previous members along with people joining the upper school team after being on the middle school team.  

“We’ve just tried over the years to make the team more and more student centered and to give students more and more voice in what happens,” said Monte-Sano. “Over the ten years, I think, we’ve handed more and more responsibility to students and we’ve constantly been impressed by how students have stepped up and taken that responsibility and done amazing things. It’s really cool to see.”

This year the upper school team consists of thirty-six students. Six of these are new on the team for this fall, twenty are returning from the previous season, and ten were on the middle school team last year, and moved up in ninth-grade. 

“A lot of new ninth-graders are joining the robotics team,” said Monica Kovacs ‘28. “There was a lot of interest at the club fair. It seems like more people are interested.”

Along with an increase in student participation we see a lot of student diversity in the team as well.

“Ten [students] self-identify as females,” said Dershimer. “We’re seeing an increase in upper school numbers as well. The other cool thing is that we’re developing a recruitment pipeline now, and increasing the representation of females is a big goal for our team. And this is our third year with a dedicated female staff member.”

Participants on the team have been recognizing the change as well.

“Actually, there’s a lot more girls joining than there had been,” said Monica Kovacs.

COVID presented many challenges for the team, as it did for the rest of the world. 

“COVID disrupted competitions,” said alumni Jeremy Kovacs ‘22.  He was on the team for four years, from 2019 to 2022. “They canceled all the competitions that year. The next year was a bit different too. My junior year, they didn’t really have competitions, so that year there wasn’t much going on.”

The team had a decrease in participants after COVID as well, and the team has made great progress since then.

 “We had a pretty small team, and then after COVID, we had probably five dedicated students, and now we’re up to 30 in that upper school,” said Jeremy Green, the current lead robotics coach.

Robotics teams are guaranteed two district competitions that start around March. In its early years, the team would just go to the two. Later on as the team progressed they did more on and off season competitions.

“We did an incredible number of competitions,” said Monte-Sano, as he spoke about the year the team made it to the world championship. “We did two district competitions, we voluntarily did a third district competition and then we did states and then we did worlds. We were super busy that year. That was an incredible year.”

The team has continued to participate in competitions on and off season. Previously for the middle school team they did one district competition, and if they qualified they could go to the state championship. Now, they have what is called a league. 

“We used to only get one competition and now we get up to four,” said Green. “They’re smaller, [and] they don’t have elimination matches. That’s changed quite a bit, especially for middle school.”

In the past, the school has had seventh grade, eighth grade, and upper school teams. Now, there is a sixth grade team as well. 

“Now we have more students and we have as many students in our sixth grade [team] as we had in the whole program almost five years ago,” said Dershimer. “[There has] been a lot of growth in the program. The other cool thing is that 25 of the sixth grade students, we’re enrolled in the preseason summer camp. We have a sixth grade to seventh grade to eighth grade to upper school team. We have a nice pipeline that we’re building out here at Greenhills.”

Over 10 years the upper school robotics team has accomplished a lot. The same is true for middle school. Last season was the first year one of our middle school teams, specifically the eighth grade team, made it to the state championship.

“We’ve seen in the 2023 season, the middle school team, for the first time ever in 10 years, qualified for the state championship,” said Dershimer. “And that was [a] phenomenal thing to have happened.  We were also awarded the connect award, and that’s important because this is a judged award that’s given to the team that most connects with their local science technology engineering community. It shows how we’re not just doing robots, we’re also connected to the curriculum at Greenhills.

The upper school robotics team has qualified for the state championship multiple times. One of its most significant achievements occurred in 2019 when, for the first time, the team qualified for the World Championship.

“Over the last nine years, the lawnmowers have been to the state championship four times, and the world championship once,” said Dershimer. “The upper school team has a really strong record. The team was, this past year, awarded the engineering inspiration award for outstanding success in advancing respect and appreciation of engineering within a team and school communities, [which] shows, again, that we’re not just about building a robot, we’re really about becoming engineers in terms of everything we do.”

That year the team worked really hard, displayed excellent teamwork, and went to a large amount of competitions that year. 

“It was a pretty big deal at the time. Our robot did pretty well,” said Jeremy Kovacs.

In the early years of the team, it was small and outreach wasn’t a large focus. Regardless, the team still found ways to incorporate it. 

“We used to go to Ford, [on] take your child to work today every year,” said Monte-Sano. “That was really fun. [We would let] Ford employees’ children drive it [the robot]. We did some presentations [for] some mentors from Ford, [and] we would go to their offices for them.”

In more recent years the upper school team has many connections with the STEM community as well. To do that, and to gain sponsorships, the team is active in their outreach.

“We went [and] did a Stem of Sound Event, we had mentors from University of Michigan come in, we had parent mentors from industry come in, we have lots of ways people were learning about STEM outside of robotics, which is really important,” said Dershimer. “We finally have the robotic scene not just isolated, [like] the robotics team is part of something.”

The team has many goals for the future of their outreach and progress in gaining sponsorships.

“I’d really like us to continue to think about how we [can] connect with industry partners,” said Dershimer. “One of the big goals this year is working to get industry sponsorships that could be finances, mentoring, opportunities for students, and really creating stronger industry partners.”

One of the largest changes that have happened since the start of the team was to the robotics work space. Initially, the team used to meet in the physics room across from the physics lab where Monte-Sano used to teach math and economics. All their tools and supplies were packed in that space, and the team would work in the hallway outside the classroom.

“It’s a really small room,” said Monte-Sano. “We just had mostly tools that I owned, packed up in the back of the room, and my cupboards were just full of tools. We would bring them out into the hallway and build in the hallway between those two physics rooms. That was really challenging. Then for a couple of years, we built in the real physics [lab]. There’s a storage room in the back of there, and we stored our tools there. We stored field pieces, [that] we would build out of wood, [which would be an] approximation of what the field pieces looked like. We still stored those in the hallway, [and] the fact that they let us do that was kind of a miracle. We had that for probably two years.”

The mentors found it harder to work in this space as the team progressed. So they searched for a space in the school that was unoccupied and could be used by the robotics team. 

“We moved down to where the shop is right now, and then slowly built that out,” said Monte-Sano. “There was nothing in there. That was just an empty room, and we slowly just added more and more. We took over the geothermal room [for storage]. The first year we had the shop space, there were two teachers and two classrooms that were down there that weren’t related to robotics at all. And it became clear, too, that we were really disruptive for them, so I lobbied to have robotics related people in those two classrooms and that’s pretty much been the case ever since.”

The space has come a long way. It has many facilities built in and it continues to expand.

“The space encourages the team to be successful and [it] supports their success,” said Dershimer. “[The space has] now grown into having a dedicated shop, a dedicated build space and classrooms that are organized.”

For their 10th Anniversary, there is a plan for a potential special drive party.

“We’re wanting to do a 10th anniversary drive party and definitely 10th anniversary shirts,” said Green. “That’s the biggest thing. Other than that, not not too much. Unless somebody would like to come up with it.”

As for the future of the team, priorities are student leadership, further improving the space, potentially hosting a middle school robotics competition, and strengthening sponsorship in terms of mentors and finances.

“I think for the future of the team, we want to continue to have the student leadership be a strong part of it,” said Dershimer. “I would like us to host an event for the middle school. I think that we could actually host a competition here at Greenhills, and the upper school team could support that.”

Currently the students are working hard in preparation of the upcoming season. 

“The thing that’s been most gratifying for me is that the spirit of the team remains the same, that we always wanted to be competitive, but we also had in mind that the main product was not winning or the robot. It was students,” said Monte-Sano. “The point of the whole exercise is to develop students who have an interest in solving problems and can work in teams and can do complex and typical things under time pressure. And my interaction with the team over the last couple of years after I’ve been involved is that that spirit remains.”