Twelfth grade, and the dumbest robot that ever won
Senior year: a brand-new tech-school teacher who actually pushed us, a Lego robot competition my friend Zach and I won with pure laziness and ingenuity, the FBLA web contest that handed me a career, A+ tutoring with Diana, and the honest truth that I look back on high school and feel proud.
This is the last of my school-year posts, the end of the road that started back in sixth grade, and I want to say something up front that not everyone gets to say. I look back on high school and feel proud. People tend to remember theirs as a cringe parade of bad decisions, and mine was not perfect, but when I go back through it the way I have been doing for this site, what I mostly feel is glad. Glad I stepped up to the plate. Glad I was a kid who engaged, with school and with a real group of friends. Senior year is where a lot of that paid off.
A real teacher, finally
The center of senior year was the second year of programming at the Lewis and Clark tech school. My junior year there had been a circus, a checked-out teacher and a room full of kids playing games off a print server, and I had basically taught myself the whole curriculum, which by then I was very good at doing. So I came into senior year with full senioritis, planning to coast and play games and do the bare minimum.
It did not work out that way, in the best possible sense, because they had hired a brand new teacher. His name was Mr. Hanley, he had come straight out of a real corporate programming job, and he was green and gung-ho and we could all tell. He went on to lead the school’s whole business program and, eventually, become something like its technical director. I liked him as a teacher, and I liked him as a person. He was smart about us, too. He knew this class had a reputation as the place you went to goof off, so instead of fighting that war the way his predecessor had lost it, he made a deal: you can play games when your work is done, if you can prove it is done, and if you do not take it too far. And that is exactly how it went. He got actual work out of us by treating us like the deal was real.
We built genuinely fun things. One project was a game of our own, and Zach, my programming partner from junior year, and I made a whole casino suite, roulette and poker and slot machines. But the project I will never forget is the robots.
The dumbest robot that ever won
Mr. Hanley got funding for Lego Mindstorms kits, the little motors and sensors and a programmable brick, which back then was a classroom novelty and not the big competition thing it later became. For weeks we just messed around learning to drive the motors. Then he announced the graded part: a competition.
He had taped a big circle on the classroom’s bare linoleum floor, maybe six feet across, with a small starting gate off one edge. Inside the circle he set nine empty soda cans on little X marks. The rules: your robot has to start inside the gate, it can never leave the circle, and it has to clear all nine cans out of the circle. Most kids used the light sensor to find the black tape and the cans and navigate, the intended way. There were not enough kits for everyone, so we worked in small teams, and the prize for first place made it real.
One kid and his partner spent the entire three or four weeks building the perfect robot. A pincer arm, careful sensors, beautifully programmed to roll out, find a can, grab it, carry it to the edge, drop it, and go back for the next one. When it was his turn it did the whole job flawlessly. It also took something like three or four minutes, methodically, one can at a time.
Zach, another kid, and I, being seniors with a terminal case of not caring, spent most of those weeks goofing off and figuring we would sort it out later. With about a week left we finally asked the real question: what is the laziest possible way to clear a circle? And we landed on something gloriously stupid. We asked Mr. Hanley if the robot could be tall, as long as it fit in the gate, and he said sure. So we built a squat little tricycle base and mounted two arms nearly three feet long, standing straight up like a person signaling a goal, balanced so precariously that the smallest jolt would make them flop out to the sides. Folded down, the two arms together were almost exactly as wide as the circle. We even put the big grippy drive wheels on the ends of the arms, so when they slammed down they would bounce instead of snapping off, and then keep the thing stable.
The program was maybe four steps. Roll forward out of the gate to about the center, shoving any cans in the way. Jiggle left, jiggle right, just enough to make both arms collapse out flat across the whole diameter. Then spin in place for ten or fifteen seconds. No light sensor. No navigation. No can-finding logic. Just a giant spinning bar sweeping the entire circle at once, cans flying off in every direction.
It worked. We set it in the gate, somebody hit start, it rolled to the middle, did its little shimmy, both arms dropped perfectly across the circle, and it spun, and every single can went skittering out. Start to finish, maybe fifteen seconds. We beat the meticulous robot, and we beat everyone, some of whom never cleared the circle at all. We had used almost no programming and a whole lot of ingenuity, and we knew it, and it was hilarious.
The only part I still feel bad about: the kid who had built the perfect machine did not take it well. When he lost, he slammed his robot down hard enough that pieces flew off it. That was the moment our fun curdled a little and we all went, okay, we are sorry, that is enough. But as a story, it is too good not to tell, and it is honestly a decent lesson about how the clever lazy solution beats the heroic complicated one more often than anyone wants to admit.
Everything else that was happening
Senior year was full. Tech school had brought me friends from all over the county, and a lot of them, like the tech-school crew from junior year, ended up on DragonSiblings. There was Laura, one of the most fun and creative people I knew, who wore old airplane goggles as a necklace and who I hung out with outside of school, bowling and playing DDR at the Ameristar. Mandy and Erica had graduated the year ahead of me, so I lost them from class, but kept them as friends.
This was also the year my web-development work turned into an actual future. I had been building sites since I was ten, and at tech school I went all in and competed through the FBLA. That whole arc, the contest, placing first at State, going to Nationals, and the internship at the grocery company’s corporate office that came out of it, is its own story, and it is the door my entire career walked through.
And there were the quieter things, the ones I am almost happier about. Diana and I did our A+ tutoring hours together at the elementary school I grew up in, going back nearly every other day for a couple of months to help little kids with their homework. Diana also got me into Dungeons and Dragons, having me over on Thursdays for a campaign, the first time I ever played, which deserves its own post one day. I was deep into World of Warcraft by then, working at the bakery, still running DragonSiblings even as I started drifting toward all these other things. Chemistry tried to convince me it needed more math than I had, which felt unfair, but I got through it like I got through all of it.
That is the whole arc, really. I came into middle school a kid pulling F’s, and I am walking out of high school as someone with a career already starting, a tight group of friends, a robot trophy I won by being a smartass, and a graduation I was proud to stand up for. Not bad for a kid who almost did not turn it around at all.