The Porch Learns More About STEM Opportunities With Oklahoma City Robotics Team

An Oklahoma City robotics team is helping teach students of all ages about opportunities in STEM.

Team OKC is hosting an open house on Saturday to teach others more about robotics, but first, the Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages Porch spoke with Team OKC to learn more about their program.

Team OKC competes within FIRST Robotics, which organizes several other teams across the country to compete in events and foster opportunities for students to explore their passions.

Andrew Harris, a high school senior who is part of Team OKC, said teams can compete by building and programming robots of all shapes and sizes.

"We're a 4-H associated team, community based, we have a bunch of students come together," Harris said. "This is from 1st to 12th grade, doing Lego robots. We have robots made out of metal that are 25 to 150 pounds."

As for why they compete, Emma Tyler, a sophomore in high school, credited those in their community for providing opportunities for students such as themselves.

"It's just it's a great community, there's so many people there," Tyler said. "It's also great opportunities for you to learn new things and be challenged, because with robotics, there's different types of work you can do."

As for the different types of ways to participate, Tyler said students can work on the various stages of design and development.

"You can work on CAD, which is a designing software, where you can design your robots before building them," Tyler said. "You can learn how to do electrical work, or even with like our high school team, we're run like a small business. So we have business sides of things like presenting and budgeting."

Harris and Tyler both said their group is looking for new members who have a passion to dive deep into STEM and learn more about robotics.

"Were always looking for new people to be involved, whether as students or volunteers," Tyler said. "So you can find more information on how to join our teams and volunteering opportunities at our website, teamokcrobotics.com, but we also do a lot of outreach or community service."

Some of that outreach, Tyler and Harris said, involves working with the Girl Scouts or the Oklahoma City Thunder and Oklahoma City Baseball Club.

"We do a bunch of different events showing off STEM," Harris said. "Showing off like, 'this is what you do if you want to learn more.'"

Fore more information about FIRST Robotics click here.