“Team Paradox” 2102

ENCINITAS—On a Saturday night San Dieguito Academy students work hard to build a new robot for this year’s FIRST Robotics Competition challenge, Logo Motion. A group 14 to 18 year olds teach each other the ropes of engineering, designing, building and marketing in order to build robots which would carry plastic triangles, circles and squares and place them on poles.

San Dieguito Academy students are known for becoming makers, doers, and dream builders. Dreams without real work are not enought. Painting murals along school corridors, staging self-written plays, and building robots – all this seems to be normal for students at SDA.


The school is covered in student art inside and out. On each office building, classroom, bathroom and hallway, walls are covered with murals of dolphins, whales, cars, oceans, tiles of each person’s individual ideas, dreams, or aspirations – some drawings are of peace signs, mermaids, trees, mythical creatures, surfers and skate boarders. After school there are always a few kids hanging out practicing music, dance moves or staging a play, both supervised and of their own free will.

So for someone to see the making of a robot would be normal at this school. Real inspiration is in the shop with the students. This is where the real magic happens. They want to be there just to wire, fuse, drill and become engineers. They study pneumonics and programming well enough to build, design and fix most problems that the robot may have during the "FIRST" Robotics competition.

George Stimson, physics and history teacher at SDA, explained that “this is a program run by kids, taught by kids, and just the kids. They do it all - teach the classes, make the design, make the robots.” And it really is a marvel to watch the kids spending hours upon hours after school teaching, working, enjoying, building, designing, drilling, and using heavy machinery intelligently.


The students began working in September by splitting into four groups, divided into building, programming, publicity and design teams. On day one they began by using simple objects and applying the rules of physics, geometry, and problem solving using straws, tape and a desk.

The build team-leaders, Senior William Sake and Junior Andrew Dalager, gave students ten minutes to build the highest vertical and then longest horizontal structure, with the help of a desk. The object could not fall, touch the ground or use more than one desk for support. The idea was to prepare them to work creatively and logically so that in just two-weeks-time the welding, drilling and shop equipment would have some purpose.

The money to build the Robot also came from students' hard work. They learned about self promotion, creativity, budget and business. Sukie Berry, a senior, coordinated the marketing and publicity department and did most of the design work for the logos. She described her Paradox design as a circuit board, though to me it appeared as an angel with the head of a bull. She said that the theme represents unity and the inner workings of a team, stating that “When stripping away a robot’s metal exterior, what is revealed is the circuitry, wires, the inner human core.” Sukie is articulate, organized, and ambitious, with easily apparent spunk and character. Not surprisingly, when asked what made her want to be there, she replied: “because I love it!”

The kids are not completely self sufficient. They work with mentors, teachers and parent volunteers. However, the volunteers insist that their roles at SDA are minimal in the kids’ work and described the difference between their students versus students from other schools as vital to their independence. At other schools, according to the parents, students do only part of the work. The robots are clearly built by instructors, whereas SDA robots are made almost entirely by relatively inexperienced student hands.

The difference, however, comes through during the competition. Students from other schools step aside to let their teachers drill while students from SDA do the drilling and fixing themselves.

Volunteer mentor Bobbie Walton explains that “the kids are the ones who fix them right there. If parents or adults build the robots, the kids don’t know what happened or how to fix them.” He believes this difference is crucial when it comes down to having the kids learn to explain to each other what could go wrong and how to work on it.

Walton added that the mentors’ real job is to “make sure that the kids don’t drill a hole into their hands."


The kids want to win for themselves. Their strength, energy, dedication and spirit makes those around them want to support them five-thousand percent. This was clear during the competition, when a neighboring team literally paraded into the Team Paradox stand and the two schools cheered for each other.

When asked about whether the parents have anything to do with student participation in Robotics and Team Paradox for college profiling, the head programmer of the team Sophomore Gabriel Cemaj said that such students simply don't come. “People that are here really want to be here.” Cemaj started as a student teacher and programmer last year when the original instructor (also a student) quit the team.

Gabe's style is quite normal to this surrounding. He makes this group think, learn, and relearn as he finishes an instructional day by running out and saying, “Everything I just taught you doesn’t help you build a Robot,” after a 2 hour session of Programming and C++.


Another student, Junior Tatiana Roy, was so proficient in working the mills and drilling, that she was able to explain in full detail the function of each drill, their use, and their unique strengths or purposes. She said that initially her parents told her she spent too much time with robotics in her first year, worrying about her grades and homework. But by the third year their concerns changed.

“They’re fine with me coming here, doing things that I like, now that I’m working on machining.” Tatiana is here because she has “always been interested in engineering” and the “robotics team [is] a great opportunity to try engineering, even on a small scale.”