Two years ago, when she was a sophomore at Glenelg High School, Megan Lu thought she would pursue a career in journalism. Then her algebra II teacher, Dean Sheridan, suggested she join the school robotics team.
"I just kept coming back and getting more involved, and now I'm here all the time," Lu said. As she thinks about her future, the senior said, "I'm looking at techie schools."
Though she still takes a journalism class -- "I'd like to keep my options open," she said -- Lu said she never would have discovered her interest in engineering if she had not joined the robotics team.
The goal of the team, which Sheridan formed four years ago, is to create a robot that can compete in FIRST Robotics competitions. The competitions were started in 1992 by Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway, along with Woodie Flowers, an MIT professor, and other scientific luminaries.
The idea behind FIRST, an acronym of For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, is to foster student interest in science by creating challenges that are fun yet difficult.
"If people would give the same recognition and stature to kids that work with technology at this level as to kids that play football, we could save the world," Sheridan said.
More than 1,600 teams worldwide participate in the competitions, including several in Maryland, but the Glenelg team is believed to be the only one from Howard County.
The Glenelg team started as a class, but after the first year it became an after-school activity, Sheridan said.
In early January, participating teams are given "tool kits" with the engines and parts that they can use to create their robots. They are also given limits on the height and weight of the finished robot, and the amount of money they can spend on additional parts.
Six weeks later, they must have completed the assignment. From that point on, the robotics teams can compete in regional and national tournaments.
Once the challenge is announced, members of the team get together and begin bouncing ideas off one another, said Chris Leonavicius, a team member. Students sometimes stay at school until 8 or 9 at night during those intense weeks of building a robot, he said.
This year, the challenge was to create a robot that could place "tetras" made of piping onto pyramid-shaped posts. At the tournaments, the robots would compete to place the most tetras on the posts, winning extra points for getting three in a row.
