How it started

In highschool, all I did was competitive robotics. I first started in 8th grade on a small team and immediately got hooked. Not on robotics per se, but the idea of winning the FRC World Championship (Worlds). It immediately (and irrationaly) became the only thing I cared about in highschool. Due to my immature hubris, my relationships with my family and friends, my intellectual curiosity, and my health all immediately deteriorated.

If you can't tell, I'm not particularly proud of this time. In the moment, it was cool to just focus on the one thing that I found worth dying for, something that I wouldn't categorize as hyperbole as I was essentially killing myself for it. Then in my junior year summer, I had a chance to take a step back and realize some things:

There were more important things than an impulsive pipe dream (shocker)
I was deeply proud of myself for trying
I thought this was a cool feeling, and didn't really know how I got here
I still really wanted to win Worlds (glad to say I overacheived on this one)

While I took a more balanced approach, I knew that I wanted more people to also feel like they could take on the world. My early attempt at articulating my beliefs was a book I wrote over that summer. While I still agree with the content, I've come to disagree with the medium. Self-help books aren't the path towards creating real change, you need to convince people that changing is worth it by getting their hands dirty, you need to help them feel the change by taking it on themselves.

How its going

I left this thesis untouched for a while until I got to Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) as an undergrad. All undergrads at WPI are required to complete an Interactive Qualifying Project (IQP), something I chose to complete on the Experiential Robotics Platform (XRP).

Their thesis sounded eerily similar: let students at a young age build experience solving hard problems (robotics challenges) as a means of building interest in STEM and confidence in their ablities. Over my freshman summer I helped write the first set of curriculum, a task that was initially laborious, but I eventually developed an appreciation for the art of distilling the complexity of a robotics concept (something like proportional control) to something that a middle school student can understand.

Hundreds of man hours put into integrating national standards, incorporating feedback from teachers, and tedisouly working through the examples ourselves to make sure they worked. But, there was still more work to be done. We failed to account for the teachers' experience: while students might be comfortable reading through the documentaiton, teachers sho are already overworked (and often don't have a robotics background) wouldn't have the bandwidth to teach themselves the content and be confident enough to teach a class the next day.

So, we got to work on the next stage of deployment: a context aware AI chatbot. I won't bore you with the technical details, it's all open source and you can message me with any questions you have about the deployment and automated eval architecture. I just wanted to mention this all since XRP is a project I really believe in. It's a problem that I don't think it solved yet, even though it is an integral failure with the current education system.

I want to contribute to solving this implicit culture problem. Currently, it's "corny" to care about something or be genuine in your actions. It's arrogant to think that you can change the world for the better. Someohow, it's stupid to think you can do something spectacular if you haven't already done so.

That's why I care, because I want other people to feel like they can care too.