Robotics by adam

Robotics by adam - May 2015 Scholarship Essay

“What happened here??” I asked with the look of shock clear on my face. The robot my partner and I had worked weeks on lied on the ground, completely disassembled.

“I really thought it was a good idea.” My partner replied. My partner, Randall, had a tendency to do things spur of the moment, and enjoyed redoing things until perfection. This contrasted greatly with my perspective of get the job done once. “The gear ratio was slightly off… the motors were overheating…” Unfortunately, I had the lack of luck in the class and was partnered with the person I could not work with at all. Though, weirdly enough, our contrasting opinions seemed to be able to get the assignments done better than anyone else in our class.

“So you disassembled it… a day before the test?!” We had been working for weeks to complete the robot in time for the test through the maze. Just the day before, we had managed to complete it, and run once through the maze with the second best time in the class. But now, we had less than a day to complete the entire project again.

“The gear ratio was perfect!” I replied. But now the problem wasn’t what he did, it was fixing it. “Let’s try your idea, who knows what will happen.” I sighed in compliancy. “Nothing to do about it now right?”

We worked furiously for the entire class period trying to fix up the robot in time before the test tomorrow. 10 minutes flew by in what seemed like seconds as we rushed to finish. Unfortunately as the class period neared its end we seemed no closer to finishing than when we had started on the project in the morning. We had managed to finish the drive train but there was still a lot of work left to do. I couldn’t help but to begin to get angry at my partner for changing everything without even asking first. But I also couldn’t help but see his point. The robot had been over-heating during the first run through, and we had some delays due to that.

“Hey, let’s come in during lunch and finish the project together!” he said quickly. I considered the idea for a bit; it would probably be the only way to finish the project in time.

“Sure, let’s get it done” I confirmed.

During lunch we managed to finish up the drive chain and get the wheels installed along with all the other components necessary to finish the maze. We had managed to finish up the robot before the due date, and to my surprise, the robot worked better than ever, though at first I loathed the idea that was suggested, I thought it would be too slow and not powerful enough to complete the maze in time. But actually, the robot managed to shave a whole 12 seconds off of its time and complete the maze even faster than it had with my personal design. I apologized to my friend afterwards for blowing up at him for just trying to help. He understood, and saw from my perspective how mad I was, but was also glad that I was accepting and tried his way. We both agreed not to make changes in the future without the others opinion first, as to not catch each other off guard and agree on all changes. Somehow, maybe through pure luck or through skill we managed to pull off a grade better than both of us could’ve on our own, and we managed to overcome our differences and continue working together for the rest of the year.