About
Helias Catholic Robotics exists to help students to not only gain engineering, programming, communication, and teamwork skills, but also to help them grow into godly leaders of tomorrow.
Engineering
Team members gain engineering skills, making robots built of metal
Teamwork
To make many different ideas turn into one good robot requires teamwork and collaberation skills
Programming
To make the robot move, programming is required. Programmers learn how to make the robot's electric motors coordinate with each other in a way the solves the challenge.
Quick Facts
We Are
An after school activity. However, one of our coaches is starting an Intro to Engineering course at Helias.
We Compete
In the FIRST® Tech Challenge (FTC).
These are metal robots, small enough to fit into an 18 inch cube, that perform tasks like lifting and moving objects to score points.
To Be on the Team You Must
Enjoy being around robots and like having fun! There are no requirements like "You have to be really smart." Seventh and eighth graders are also welcome to the team.
How do I join?
Reach out to coach Melissa Rockers: mrockers@heliascatholic.com
Or email us at info@heliasrobotics.org
Starting about ten years ago, we brought students the unique opportunity to hone their engineering, math, problem solving, and teamwork skills before hitting college or the workforce.
In 1989, inventor Dean Kamen and professor emeritus at MIT Woody Flowers created For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST®), an organization that runs several after school robotics programs. Kamen was disappointed with the number of kids going into science and technology fields, so he developed FIRST®'s programs to be fun, exciting and stimulating, similar to sports, just with robots.
FIRST® has several levels of competitions, with different sizes of robots and different demands on teams. We compete in the FIRST® Tech Challenge, the middle level, with metal robots (rather than Lego®s) but only 18 x 18 x 18 inches in size (rather than 3' x 3' x 3').
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COVID slowed us down in 2020-2021 but we are back to full steam again now. We can't wait to see what's next for the team!