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Rhinebeck High School students and staff should take a few minutes of their community lunch on May 29 to check out the robotics club’s first BattleBots competition in the high school gymnasium.
“It’ll be a big event to showcase our club and boost engagement to bring new members in and continue our organization,” said senior Sawyer Giles, who will study engineering at the University of Maryland.
Club members ordered their kits through a Rhinebeck Science Foundation grant; are assembling, customizing and coding their robots, and will have the robots compete against each other in BattleBots.
“We’d love for a lot of students to come and have a lively student section,” said senior Zsuzsanna Moore. “You should expect to see four unique teams that have spent the past two months working on and customizing their BattleBots. You should expect a lot of enthusiasm.”
The robotics club was founded during the 2023-2024 school year by four sophomores – Kaia Rouse, Ellie Firestone, Beatrice Macdonald and Moore. All four will be graduating next month.
“We decided to start the club because we noticed in the high school there weren’t many creative engineering opportunities,” said Moore. “There are opportunities to take engineering classes. We just felt the school lacked a robotics club, so we felt why not start one ourselves.”
The four students put together a proposal to start the club, which held events in the auditorium the past two years to get the word out about the club to future high school students and their families.
In its third year, the robotics club continues to grow and has new co-advisers Misty Decker and Peter Szwed.
“I think it’s really fulfilling to see so many people interested in it, and people diligently working and excited about what we’re doing because it makes us feel what we did is helping people and making people happy,” said Rouse.
“We built a strong foundation to pass it on to younger kids and allow future generations to keep pursuing these types of extracurriculars is really exciting and fulfilling to see.”
The seniors hope BattleBots is the start of what may come in the future, robotics competitions against other schools.
“We really hope this continues to take off and keeps building, and I think we’re all really excited to see what happens a couple of years down the line,” said Rouse.