Fresh out of summer break and finished with the first day of school, high school students of all grades seep into Room 13. They are met by Engineering teacher Drew Wormington and the eight different captains of Pine View’s Jungle Robotics club:
- Team Captain (eleventh-grader Hamza Memon)
- Business Captain (twelfth-grader Max Friedland)
- Facilities Captain (twelfth-grader Anthony Donza)
- Computer-Aided Design (CAD) Captain (twelfth-grader Lisa Zhang)
- Mechanical Captain (twelfth-grader Conner Vice)
- Media Captain (eleventh-grader Kai Sprunger)
- Programming Captain (twelfth-grader Emre Muessemeyer)
- Safety/Spirit Captain (twelfth-grader Mia Ortlieb)
The number of new students to the club amount to about 30, for a total of 60 (not including the captains).
At about 1:30 p.m. or 2 p.m., Wormington and Memon quiet the crowd and introduce themselves as well as the various captains. Then Memon introduces the club and informs the group of their day’s objectives. Since it is only the first day, Memon explains the club in-depth and then allows the captains to show PowerPoints about their respective subteams to give the students a general idea of what goes into their part of creating the robot and how each subteam functions. So ends the first day of robotics club.
Twelfth-graders Max Friedland and Lisa Zhang — Business Captain and CAD Captain, respectively — work on the construction of the robot with the rest of the team. 
Twelfth-grader Conner Vice, Mechanical Captain, explains a component of the robot to a group of students.
For the next few weeks, Memon introduces each daily objective and then allows the rest of the club to break off into the subteams. Members who have yet to join a subteam bond and get to know each other better, since they will be working together until the For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (F.I.R.S.T.) competitions in March, one in Orlando and another in West Palm Beach.
Each subteam but Safety and Facilities has their own activities:
- The mechanical team has students build a marshmallow catapult.
- The programming team does an activity in which one person would write instructions and someone else would draw based off the instructions.
- The business subteam has students call companies to give them a taste of what they’d do during build season (January to end of February).
- The media subteam plays Gartic Phone with students.
- The CAD subteam shows students around their worksite.
At around 5 p.m., one of the juniors or seniors goes out to buy dinner for everyone, then all of the members continue working until Wormington leaves, or stay until 8 p.m. if a mentor is there to supervise them.
The first months of the club are focused on integrating new members and teaching them how to use all the equipment. The challenge for the competitions is released Jan. 7, marking the start of “build season.” After school and on the weekends, the team works tirelessly to meet the competition objectives.
The robotics season of 2022 involved robots having to climb vertical monkey bars and balance on a table, while the current year’s goal is for a robot to pick up cones and places them on pikes as well as cubes to be placed on platforms of different elevations.
The robot is scored on the height of the platforms it can place cubes on (lower points for lower platforms) and overall performance. The robot can advance either by looking the most visually appealing, having the most creative design, or scoring the most points. From the state competitions to regional competitions, then to the worldwide competition in Houston, Texas, there are many teams competing with their minds set on winning. Memon and his team of dedicated students have high hopes for the competitions and are giving it their all.
A QR code to this article appears in print on March 9, 2022, Sci-Tech, Page 5, of The Torch.
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