New Haven Independent

The man in the photo is Ernie Smoker, a physics teacher at Hill Regional Career High School and adviser to the robotics team, which meets at Career but is open to students from all New Haven high schools. He started as a volunteer mentor to the team, while holding down an engineering-related marketing job. But he changed careers. Click here to listen to why he loves his new job.

On a cold, sunny Wednesday afternoon, this reporter visited the team as students worked in a large room with floor to ceiling windows, putting the finishing touches on their entry in this year’s New England regional competition, to be held in Hartford March 15-17.

p(clear). The actual robot they built has already been sent up there, “under quarantine,” Smoker explains. Members of all the teams work within very strict time limits, and when their time is up, the robot must leave their hands. Here, sophomore Philip Schinis builds one of the extra batteries that can be switched into their creation to keep it functioning as peppily as possible to accomplish a specified set of tasks, one of which is placing or tossing as many of those plastic tubes as possible on a rotating mulit-armed mechanical “spider.”

p(clear). Click here to listen to senior Mohamed Badawi (pictured) explain how they’ve built this year’s model and how they hope to gain extra points in the competition. This is his third year competing. He plans to major in engineering in college next year, as do some of the other experienced team members.

Smoker emphasized that students with all kinds of backgrounds and interests sign up for the club. In fact, he says, the big, cozy room flooded with sunlight has become like a second home to many of the students who live nearby, who sometimes bring younger siblings in after school. And some of the teacher/mentors bring their kids in, especially for weekend work sessions. When this reporter visited, the hands-on work was being done by four male students, but Smoker saed the club membership of about 30 includes many girls, and everyone participates at some level in all aspects of the work.

The club was started eight years ago by several retired engineers, and for eight years the students have participated in the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Competition.

They’ve done very well, too. Last year, the team ranked second in the competition. In 2005, the team, for the first time, qualified for the regional quarterfinals, finishing
8th in a field of 35 teams.

When they started out, the team named its robot CRASH, for Career Robotics Are So Hot. Each succeeding generation has been named CRASH II, CRASH III, etc, (pictured is CRASH VII, the 2006 model). Smoker said the kids now think the acronym is hokey. “Now we like to say it just stands for the way they drive the robot,” he said, chuckling.