By Mikaela STONE

Soaring into the Ventura Regional First Robotics competition, Crescenta Valley High School’s Falkon robotics team scored second overall in an ocean-themed robot face-off against 51 other teams. The team also scored the Imagery Award for artistic presentation and the Woodie Flowers Finalist Award for excellent mentorship to honor the commitment of instructor Heather Abrams. Woodie Flowers was a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His specialty areas were engineering design and product development.

Student Dahae S. won Dean’s List Finalist Award and student Abigail C. made the Dean’s List Semifinals. The Dean’s list Award honors student leadership and “extraordinary” dedication to community, recognizing students who participate both in working on the robot and in the community outreach requirement of FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics. 

Dahae worked on the team’s Scout App, which took in data regarding the robot’s performance and inspired her interest in data analysis. Her work helped the team optimize its strategy as robots battled it out in competitions to stack “coral” PVC pipes and climb up a steel cage. The CV robot focused mostly on defense by preventing the other robots from scoring. 

Abigail worked with teammates on the artistic side of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math), working to build bonds between the many competing teams by decorating Crescenta Valley High School’s pit with a nautical theme and designing a tabletop playing card game with the image of each competing team ranked by how long they have participated in FIRST Robotics. The cards also featured as rare collectible photos of past and present judges. No team had created such a game before and it resulted in a reason for the players to meet up, talk and have fun. 

Robotics student Logan said, “Even though it’s a competition, we’re all interested in FIRST and STEM and it was cool to meet other people with similar interests.”

The Falkon art initiative did not stop there; students also submitted an animation to show how the team operated, composed of both stop motion and digital art. The film won honorable mention for its creativity, in spite of complications from the Eaton Fire. While FIRST Robotics did offer an extension, the team finished animating the video in just one week. The filmmakers focused on how Crescenta Valley High School robotics had an open door policy, welcoming all students regardless of experience or time commitment. Members are defined as having attended five or more robotics meetings. 

One hundred and thirty five students call the Falkon robotics team home. The team is largely student-led. Adult mentors, many of whom have applicable knowledge from leading academic and corporate STEM organizations such as Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Walt Disney Imagineering, UC Riverside, and Salesforce, focus instead on helping students to be their best selves. Logan described mentor Heather Abrams “as one of the reasons I come back to FIRST every day … she is the reason why I want to be a better person.” 

The students nominated Abrams for the Woodie Flowers Finalist Award for her excellent mentorship. In the application essay, they described her as “an alien” because they believed no one had as much executive function to devote to her constant time commitments without burning out. 

The essay in part read, “By day, Abrams is a project manager at Salesforce. By night, she pursues her MBA. With her extraterrestrial time-warping abilities, Heather Abrams invests more hours than humanly possible to be the unfaltering backbone of [Falkon robotics].” 

When Abrams was a student at Crescenta Valley High School, she worked to set up FIRST LEGO League robotics with local schools and Girl Scout programs. The pared-down program teaches elementary and middle school students how to program a LEGO robot, and explore programming and engineering in bite-sized ways. 

The Falkon team’s community outreach is the part of FIRST Robotics that the students report they are most proud of. They worked with local school districts to secure grants to distribute 32 FIRST LEGO League robotics kits to schools, including to five Title I schools. To ease the daunting task of teaching coding and engineering to children as young as 9 years of age, the Falkon students developed curriculum for teachers and volunteers to follow. The Falkon team offers mentoring at Crescenta Valley High School to 11 teams during the fall season. 

To encourage the students, they hosted their second ever outreach day at CVHS, which showcased booths from the community and students that focused on the practical uses of science, technology, engineering and math. Student and Dean’s List Award winner Dahae noted that STEM and art go hand in hand – a fact the outreach day celebrated by showcasing home art from the children who arrived. With the Falkon team exhibiting their robot and Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s booth presenting how the company uses robotics skills in its daily work, many students felt excited to join FIRST LEGO League – and Falkon robotics, when the time comes. 

Heather Abrams is proud to see her mentees continuing the robotics legacy. “They definitely make me very optimistic for the future,” she said. “I don’t worry so much about what’s coming with the next generation because these kids are so bright and thoughtful and they really care about our community.”