Meander down an Oakton High School hallway on a Saturday and you just might run into a robot.

That’s because Oakton’s after-school For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) team is preparing to compete April 27-30 at the FIRST Championship in St. Louis. They qualified by winning the Virginia state title competition at the University of Virginia in February.

The Cougar Robotics Club members work hard at their extracurricular activity, which often appeals to students already devoted to studying mathematics and engineering.

“My life revolves around school, robotics and volleyball,” said Danny Kulich, a senior and veteran member who has already been accepted into Virginia Tech to attend the School of Engineering. 

Prathibha Chintagunt, a sophomore and second-year club member, works on website development. She takes AP Computer Science, PreCalculus Honors and Chemistry Honors.

Chintagunt remembers visiting Oakton High as a Luther Jackson Middle School student and saw the robots displayed at the Activities Fair to promote the club. She was hooked.  

Adult mentors are a critical part of the team. Chuck Harris, lead mentor for the Cougar Robotics Club, has devoted thousands of hours to the students since he started volunteering his time when his oldest son participated eight years ago. His third son, Steven, is now a senior and serves as the club’s president.

Duane Mason, who works professionally as a systems engineer at SAIC, doesn’t have kids of his own but devotes Tuesday and Thursday nights, and Saturdays to the club.

“I come for the pizza,” he laughs.

The Cougar Robotics Club includes the FIRST Technology Challenge (FTC) team, which comprises mostly freshman, sophomore and junior members and the FIRST Robotics Challenge (FRC) team, home to mostly seniors. The FIRST organization is an international nonprofit founded by Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway.

FIRST’s goal is to encourage and promote science, technology engineering and math (STEM) careers by making it more like a sport with annual competitions that draw thousands of students internationally.

On a recent Today Show interview Kamen said, “We have to create a generation of kids that are as passionate about innovation as they are about football,” he said. “I want kids to see that competing with the muscle hanging between their ears is the only sport where all kids can participate.”

Funding a team isn’t cheap, and the Oakton team, which has a budget of about $20,000, depends on corporate donations from Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon and BAE Systems, among others.

And the team has certainly achieved great things with that budget.

In November 2009 Steven Harris and fellow student Brian Hortellano were invited to the White House to help President Barack Obama kick off his STEM-related educational campaign called Educate to Innovate. After the president’s remarks that day, Harris and Hortellano demonstrated a robot they built as part of the 2009 FRC.  (To read a blog post posted by Steven on the White House website about this event click here.)

This year the First Tech Challenge Teams will compete in a program called “Get Over It.” Each tournament features alliances of two teams playing side-by-side on the playing field with their robots. Alliance partners compete to score the most points by completing various tasks, including emptying baton dispensers filled with 6-inch long PVC tubes and placing them in stationary and rolling goals.

Creating the robot and competing in the tournament cultivates life skills such as planning, brainstorming, teamwork and leadership, as well as research and technical skills, Chuck Harris said. 

Though the Cougar Robotics Club heads to St. Louis next month for a national competition, they remain closer to home this weekend to compete Saturday in the FRC Regional Championship at the Convention Center in Washington, D.C.