‘Building together’: Lake Oswego Robotics teams visit Doernbecher Children's Hospital

It’s clear that Lake Oswego Robotics is growing each year, adding more teams and more student participants.

Currently, Lake Oswego is home to five FIRST Tech Challenge teams — smaller teams with smaller competition robots — and one FIRST Robotics Competition team, The Lake Monsters, who build and operate the largest robot. There are also numerous elementary school Lego robotics teams.

As discussions of future multi-use robotics and STEM spaces swirl around the Lake Oswego School District’s long-range facilities planning committee, Lake Oswego Robotics has worked to highlight its outreach from the past school year, including a visit to Doernbecher Children’s Hospital.

“When you do a lot of robotics, you get a little bit of tunnel vision,” said Mila Kaplan, the Lake Monsters captain next school year. “Once you bring that to a new setting … people haven’t really seen this kind of stuff before and they’re excited to see it. It can be a nice experience because these kids have never seen huge, large-scale robots. Most of them have just been in the hospital for most of their lives. It almost brings a new purpose to robotics.”

The children’s hospital outreach at Doernbecher was started in 2018 by the Lake Monsters, specifically to show robotics to children who’ve spent much if not all of their lives in the hospital due to serious illness.

“My sister started this outreach,” said Lakeridge junior Sophia Lindsay. “We spent a lot of time at Doernbecher ourselves and it’s very rare to get excited about something in that kind of environment. It’s really hard to be happy and excited and look forward to something.”

“Just seeing their reactions to everything is so fun,” added Helena Du, Lake Monsters’ outreach co-lead.

When the Lake Monsters travel for outreach, they bring one of two robots: Seymour or Eclipse. The smaller FTC team Mostly Operational went with Lake Monsters to Doernbecher this year. The kids made paper airplanes and then launched them with the FTC robot.

“They can move the robot around and then launch it,” said Gabriel Nickerson from Mostly Operational. “It’s always so satisfying to see on their faces when they get to hit the green button and see the airplanes they built fly.”

Other than the Doernbecher outreach, Lake Oswego Robotics teams have raised money to support high school students in Hawaii after the Lahaina fire and established a STEM program with the Oregon School for the Deaf called Feel the Music.

“They might not be able to experience music in the same way as we do with our ears, but they still have other sensory feelings, like touch and sight, that can help them kind of feel what the music is like,” said Du. “So alongside one of our mentors, we created a little robot design where it allows children to feel — feel the music as the name implies — through light and vibrations that go according to the beats and sounds that the music plays.”

Kaplan and the rest of the Lake Monsters leaders recently met with Superintendent Jennifer Schiele to discuss a future permanent home for robotics. Schiele said that there are no plans at this time to move robotics or dislodge the students from their current home by Lake Oswego High School.

In the future, the district would like to build multi-use spaces for classes and robotics to share at both high schools.

The robotics students think the biggest hurdle they face is just letting people know they exist.

“We believe that STEM can grow exponentially in Lake Oswego school district. We have the dedicated students and the dedicated mentors and interested students to do that,” said Kaplan. “If we don’t have actual room to grow, we will continue to be overlooked.”

The 150 students who participate in robotics all believe that it’s a worthy investment by the district.

“I’ve very much learned to be able to work with the rest of the team. To work together, bouncing ideas off of each other, building together and not just on your own is a key thing,” said Nickerson. “Also, very practically, I’ve learned CAD.”

Lake Oswego Robotics plans to come together time and time again, from building a robot or going out into the community.