Volunteering at McKinley Technology High School

Update (Sat. 3/17/24 @ 1:48 AM EST): I’m writing to give an update on my experiences volunteering at McKinley Technology High School in NE, Washington D.C. I’m also attaching a more recent picture of the robot! It is now a fully functioning robot. Overall it’s been a great experience and I’ve learned so much from the students. I would 100% become a volunteer again (if time avails). I’ve tried to add value to what the student’s have been doing with the robot. But the reality of the situation is that I’ve learned more from them than they’ve learned from me. I never had the opportunities that the students have at McKinley when I was a young person; therefore, it has made me so happy to help support them. I want to update the post because there are some key lessons that I want to remember forever from my experiences at McKinley:

• To gain expertise in a domain, you have to just do it: There is no substitute for practical experience. Sometimes because of our circumstances, we never get the practical experience we need. In these situations, you have to create opportunities for yourself and keep trying. You have to trust that if you stay prepared, one day an opportunity for practical experience will open up.
• Be efficient when it comes to problem solving: You get better at solving problems the more problems you solve. Sounds obvious, but it’s so true. You never need to know everything. You just need to have enough knowledge to be able to solve a specific problem. Embrace just-in-time learning. I learned this from one of the students who used Microsoft Bing’s Copilot to get the information he needed, but stopped as soon as he got the answer he needed. He went straight to implementation next!
• Don’t focus on theoretical solutions. Focus on simple and practical solutions: I had an experience where I was working with one of the students and we were trying to measure the robot’s bumpers and doing a mathematical solution. One senior volunteer suggested an applied solution that we could do with blocks of wood instead; it was genius! I learned that it’s always important to find the simplest solution, especially if there are multiple solutions to choose from.
• Grind very hard, especially because real engineering requires an extreme amount of effort: Some of the students were in the lab ALL THE TIME. They were there multiple days after school and even there on the weekends. Man, I guess that’s what it takes to do real engineering. For me, I had trouble keeping up with them at times in terms of energy! But I’m not afraid to grind hard and I will always put my best foot forward when it comes to engineering.
• To get started, just try stuff: One of the students said something so profound that I want to record it right here: “To get started, I usually just try stuff”. It’s this creative and experimental approach that counts when it comes to engineering. Seriously: when you are unsure what to do, just try stuff, make mistakes, and readjust along the way!
• Engineering is more successful and more fun when you work on projects with other people: Just look at the updated robot; there’s no way a single person could have built it. Engineering is always a team sport. You won’t build any big, scalable projects through your own efforts. You always need other people to cover your blind spots! Working with other people helps you solve problems faster and you learn a lot from others’ experiences.

Just being around the students has given me so much energy and has re-energized me with respect to engineering. For a while after graduate school, I lost steam when it came to doing engineering and technical work. But the passion is back! My biggest dream has always been to become an engineer and work in engineering. For many years in my 20s, it was my WHOLE IDENTITY. Now I’m good to go and I will be grinding hard to put out some of my own projects! Many times when I try doing my own projects, I freeze up and don’t know what to do. I make excuses and don’t want to start. But you know what? Make a plan and execute the plan, no matter what. You do know what to do! There’s ChatGPT after all. You get better at planning, building, and troubleshooting engineering projects the more that you do it 💯. You can develop expertise in anything through practice. I will be putting out some of my own projects this year. If not this year, then next year. I will keep trying. What’s the worst thing that could happen? The key is to remember: all problems have a solution. When you encounter a new or unexpected problem, stay calm, cool, and collected and keep on truckin’. :)

Original Post (Tue. 1/30/24): I’ve recently started volunteering again for the non-profit organization RESET (Raising Excitment for Science, Engineering, and Technology) after an almost two year hiatus. I last volunteered for RESET from Fall,2019 - Spring,2022. In previous volunteering opportunities, I was always working with middle school students teaching Scratch (which is a programming language that is geared towards middle school students to get them interested in coding), but this year I’m working with high school students on a robotics competition at McKinley Technology High School in NE, Washington D.C. The students are high school sophomores to seniors and some of them are quite advanced in their technical abilities. Some are extremely strong in electrical and mechanical engineering whereas others are extremely strong in software engineering. It’s very clear to me that some of them are going to excel when they go to college to study any of the engineering disciplines.

The robot that the team is trying to build is for the First Robotics Competition (see picture above). This is a YouTube video from another team that demonstrates the full repertoire of the robot and what it should do in order to win the maximum number of points in the competition. As you can see from the video, the robot has to move autonomously around an obstacle course and intake orange plastic rings. Then the robot has to shoot the rings into designated receptacles from near and far distances. Ideally in the end, the robot is also able to leverage a robotic arm for climbing purposes. The movement around the obstacle course has to be precise, the intake of the orange rings has to be precise, and the shooting of the orange rings into receptacles has to be precise, with enough velocity to hit the target but not overshoot it.

I’ve always enjoyed working for RESET because of what I learn about myself everytime. I find that when I’m working/helping young people, I learn more from them than they learn from me. The way that I’ve tried to add value to the team is to help them with:

1. Software troubleshooting, where I introduced to some team members the power of Microsoft Bing’s Copilot search tool. Whenever they face a software difficulty, I showed the software team that they can always input the error into Microsoft Bing’s Copilot (a ChatGPT4 conversational chatbot search tool) to quickly diagnose the error.
2. Project planning, where I help the team define tasks that need to be done per week. I help the team breakdown tasks, assign deadlines and define who’s responsible for each task. This makes individual team members accountable for their individual tasks and helps them make progress each and every week.

I could see myself eventually getting my hands dirty and doing some of the electrical and mechanical engineering myself! I think tinkering is so cool and that’s what engineering is really all about. It’s about working on a cool project with a good group of people, such that the end product is so much bigger and better than what an individual could build by him or herself alone. The electronics with regard to this robot is pretty complex with lots of communications equipment that interfaces with both the hardware and software; configuring and wiring the communications equipment is quite the challenge. I’m not at that level yet where I can contribute to the hardware/network engineering, but maybe I can learn. Other things I’ve learned so far from volunteering with the these high students so far:

• Just do stuff; can’t make progress if you are not in there getting your hands dirty.
• Have fun and enjoy working with new tools and new people.
• Take action and make it happen; find a way or make a way. The idea, no matter how far-fetched in the beginning, can be refined as you start doing stuff. The initial idea is most likely wrong, so you have to shape it such that you get closer to the truth.

Pretty cool! 💯