SANJITA SRINATH

As competition season finishes and our team starts reflecting together on the past season, I have started thinking more and more about my 5 years in FIRST. This year is my third season competing in FIRST Tech Challenge and I competed for two years in FIRST LEGO League and my journey to where I am today has been wonderful.

I started FIRST LEGO League in 5th grade during the Animal Allies season. I was in a 10 person team coached by my mom and my friend’s mom. Our team definitely had our ups and downs, but we worked well together as a team, and while we weren’t the best team there, we were only there to learn. That year, I learned a lot about the design process and the basics of creative programming and it solidified my interest in robotics, as well as making me realize how I could connect robotics to my other areas of interest. Our project that year was focused on solving pet anxiety through a robotic dog collar that would listen for an increased and agitated heartbeat. This was our rookie year in FLL and we were pretty inexperienced but excited to learn more. We actually ended up winning an award and progressing to states where we competed strongly.

The next year, we decided to forgo the large team due to scheduling difficulties and I competed in HYDRODYNAMICS in FLL in a two-person team, coached by our parents. I spent nights either in my living room or their living room, hunched over our computers learning how to manipulate the blocks in the EV3 programming software to create a way for our robot to move based on a measurement length and sensor input and not the number of rotations of the wheels. This year as I learn more about control theory from ctrlaltftc.com and as soon as I read about the difference between open-loop and closed-loop control, I recognized that what I did in the HYDRODYNAMICS season was the basic version of closed-loop control, more of which I would learn in 2021 and 2022. As this was a two-person team it required strong leadership from both of us and I took an additional lead in the role of designing our robot. Our robot had a strong design and was functionally robust. We won a qualifier level award for our robot design and progressed to states where we again competed strongly. One of my favorite memories from this season is dancing with my teammate at the end of the awards session just celebrating the successful season and celebrating our accomplishments.

This was the end of my journey in FIRST LEGO League but it only kickstarted a deep interest in engineering which I will detail in a later post about my further forays into robotics and engineering. 🙂