On Saturday, Feb. 3, three Indian exchange students from the FRC Team Sigma 9629 arrived in New Jersey. They were here to learn about the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) by shadowing members of the Pascack Pi-oneers robotics team.
The trip was carefully planned for many months in advance. The junior and senior students attended daily classes alongside Hills upperclassmen, followed by robotics in the afternoons and evenings. They also explored New York City, the Apple Store in Woodcliff Lake, and Princeton University.
“I really enjoyed spending time with the team. I enjoyed seeing how everything works as it should. Our team’s a bit of chaos, probably because everyone just loves construction and nothing else. But I enjoyed seeing how all [their] different subdivisions work together to create a finished robot by the end of it,” said Dhyan Shah.
“The robotics division is somewhat similar. We work on a similar timeline. We work in a similar way,” said Kabir Doshi.
“This team [the Pascack Pi-oneers] is school based. Our team is community based, so it’s just people who volunteer…None of us know each other outside of robotics at our team,” added Shah.
When asked about their favorite class at Hills, both students responded with the same answer: biology.
“I enjoyed the labs. I’m not a bio student, but I really enjoyed the bio labs, even the physics labs. They’re more organized and there’s cool equipment, cool classes, good people,” said Shah.
The students aim to integrate valuable lessons from the Pascack Pi-oneers into their own team’s practices, which is located at the RoboFun Lab Academy in Mumbai, India.
“Organization, teamwork, success,” said Doshi.
“We learned a lot from Lisa [Ruggieri] about how to put ourselves forward to the judges for different awards. She taught us yesterday about what we should do for Rookie All-Stars. That’s stuff that we’d like to implement as soon as we get back, we’re going to start working on it as soon as we’re on the flight. We hope to win. We can see you in worlds [the FRC Championships],” said Shah.
Hills students and Pascack Pi-oneer team leaders recounted their experiences from the five-day program.
“I think it was great to meet people from other FTC teams around the world. Being able to be in my classes with them was cool because we were able to do a lot of experiments and other stuff together. I think we got to know each other better than expected,” said Hills junior Gowri Santhosh Kumar Rekha.
“It was a lot of fun hanging out with you guys. Even just outside of robotics, like during classes or during lunch, it was fun to talk about your cultures and your backgrounds compared to ours,” said junior Kenneth Ang.
“I think you can learn a lot in one week from the same group of people. Even though it was only one week, it was great,” added Rekha.
