Human Powered Vehicle: Travis Schuh Robotics Mentor
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f you were to meet Travis Schuh, a mentor on the Mountain View FRC robotics team, many things might pop into your head: “He seems to know what he’s doing,” “he seems a little awkward,” or if you were into FIRST activities you might even find him slightly intimidating. Many of these thoughts would describe him at first glance, but if you were to hang around him for a while many of them might prove more accurate than others.
By Christopher Mintz
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ravis is a 27 years old Mountain View High School and FRC Alumni who, after going to Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, came back to live and work in the Bay Area. He now works at Auris Surgical Robotics and mentors for the Mountain View Robotics team in his spare time. He is extremely focused on not only trying to advance engineering, but also trying to get other people into it and bring them up to a high skill level. He achieves this
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mostly through the medium of FRC. FRC is a robotics challenge that has grow from its first year in 1992 with a couple teams in a high school gym to literally thousands of teams around the globe and two international championships. This year is the first year for two international championship events in the same year due to the increased number of teams the Saint Louis event center was too small to host it. FRC’s competition calls for teams of high schoolers to build high performing robots
in order to succeed. Due to lack of experience there’s a lot of help and advice needed along the way. This role is filled by mentors on a team. Mentors like Travis can give anywhere from technical experience to leadership and organizational experience; he represents this growing mentor movement through the technical experience he provides to the team and imparts to the students. Because of the the fact that I am on the team 971 with Travis, and the pilot human player, which
helps the robot score points on the field, I get an interesting view into his life. I also end up seeing some of his life stories. One such story happened at the Championship in Houston, when our our intake chain broke. he intake chain, which controlled how extended the mechanism was, broke in our second to last match of the first day. This was devastating to the robot and needed to be fixed for our team to continue on. Travis, in his role as mentor, spearheaded the repair. The team working on the repair included his dad, who is our lead mentor, and me. We worked on putting the intake chain together before so were able to help get it done. We had one other match left in the day and needed to get it finished fast. First, we had to drop the robot’s bumpers to access the gearboxes that controlled the extension of the intake. This was a task that got done quickly as it has happened a thousand times before. After the gearboxes were exposed Travis inspected the sprockets to see if anything was wrong with them. Once he thought they were fine he moved his inspection on to the bearings, which assists with the sliding of the intake chain. We found that the bearings on the left side of the robot were crushed. He then carefully slid the intake in and out only to discover that the chain on that side was limp and probably broken. Travis and his dad got to work replacing the hard stop in the robot that defined its range mechanically, while I decided to get the tools to start taking out the gearboxes to access the chain. After
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the hard stops on the robot made it out we started on the next step, which was taking out the gearbox out. In the meantime, Travis worked on the right side while I disassembled the left. When everything that kept the intake in was off he could take it out we were able to see that the break had happened toward the start of the intake chain. Travis determined that the new chain we had put in at the last competition was broken. We hoped that the American chain would have worked better and longer due to the quality of the material, however because it was thinner material it didn’t work as long. Luckily we still had the Chinese chain we had earlier replaced and it was made of heavy enough gauge that it could hold up for the rest of the event. We pulled the chain out and started working to put everything back together. However, before we could start, we had to play the final match of the day. Travis figured out how to secure the intake so that it would remain all the way in with ropes instead. This adjustment meant we could not pick up any balls, which was the main task our robot completed, but we could still do the other tasks. Even with the lack of ability to pick up balls, we could still help with the other ways of scoring points. We played the match, and ended up just barely winning. Once we were done and
off the field of play we went back to our pit to continue the process of carefully putting our robot back together. Midway through the process of putting the gearboxes back on the robot we were informed that the match would be replayed at the end of the day due to errors with the field system that connects to the robots. Now we were on a time crunch. We managed to reassemble the robot in time for a rematch and we ended up finishing the match winning by a large margin this time. This is one example of how Travis shows his dedication and focus. There are many other times in and out of robotics competition where similar challenges crop up that he jumps on them. His dedication and focus are qualities that he has honed and sharpened over the years along with his technical knowledge. All of this has really helped to make him the effective mentor he is today.
FIRST Facts: - FRC has been running since 1992 - FIRST was started by Dean Kamin so more highschoolers could explore STEM activities -Dean’s goal that hehas esspoused over and over again was to give high schoolers “sport teams” but for robots. - Every year students who help push FIRST’s ideal’s of technology are nom - Every regional awards a mentor for the Woodie Flowers award to recognize mentors who help inspire students - Woodie Flower’s helped coin the term gracious professionalism to describe the relasionship everyone should exemplify in FIRST - Woodie Flowers was the host of Scientific American Frontiers before he joined FIRST
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ravis started developing his technical skillset at a young age. His father Michael was working at NASA when it decided to host California’s first FRC Silicon Valley Regional. Michael brought his kids there and they saw just how cool these robots were. When all his kids showed interest Michael help get FIRST Lego League up and running in California. This is where in 4th grade Travis started to build his STEM experience. He continued doing FLL until his freshman year in high school but along the way he also started doing another Stem activity: Botball, which he entered in middle school. Once he made it to high school he began doing FRC where he started to build more manufacturing skills and project management skills, because the scope of the project for FRC is a step up from messing around with legos. Also in his senior year he was the only returning student so he stepped up and helped organize the team. This was where he really started to building leadership skills. Travis enjoyed FRC, but when he graduated and went to college at Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts, it was hard for him to go back and become a mentor on his former high school team due to the distance from the group. He did not, however, take breaks from STEM activities as he joined his college’s Human Powered Vehicle
team and advanced the team using the manufacturing knowhow he acquired in high school. During this time he also honed his manufacturing skill in his college’s more professional workshop. After graduating he made his way back to California using his technical skills to secure a job at a surgical robotics company which was close enough in location that he could return to be a mentor on the Mountain View FRC team. Travis’s leadership skills started being developed when he initially joined FIRST programs. However, there was a huge leap in his senior year of high school. During Travis’s final year on the team he was the only returning senior. To many people this might not look good because he was one of the only experienced mentors on the team. This meant he had to step up to lead the team. Many might think, “Oh no, looks like this year Mountain View won’t have a good robot.” However, due to his leadership, the team won Cal game’s offseason event. One of the issues that he had to overcome was getting drawings out to machinist sponsors. Team 971 makes a robot fully with CAD, Computer Aided Design, every year before the team actually builds the robot. Using this process they can keep track of what goes where and can more easily change pieces of the design when something doesn’t work out. Another
purpose of the CAD is to send out drawings of all the pieces that cannot be made at school to a machinist so that they can make a part that is correct and useable. aking drawings is not a high skill task therefore it is something most people on the team can do. Unfortunately if it is done wrong it can set you back a long time because you will get an incorrect part shipped to you. Travis set up a program for everyone to do drawings where anyone could start a drawing and get the part done. After a drawing was done, two others would check the drawing before it would finally be checked by Travis before it was sent out. This way more skilled students could still be working on higher skilled tasks while also assisting making drawings or checking them to ensure each one got done right. Looking back on this experience Travis remembers, “...we spent a lot of time, forever, doing drawings
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compared to how long it should have taken us...” however he also believes that “It was a fun and rewarding
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ometimes you’ve just got to have fun building robots and learn things out of that.” -Travis Schuh
experience. Everyone had a lot of fun and we got some good work done too.” Reflecting like this is something makes Travis such a good mentor. He can see what went poorly and be able to streamline the process, however he can also recognize
parts that went well and try to keep those the same for the future. Travis hopes to continue mentoring on FRC team 971 for a while. He hopes that he can stabilize the time he spends on the team because he realizes that his over participation is not quite sustainable. He is looking forward to seeing alumni from the team come back and help out for a season, or just talk to them. One of Travis’s favorite things is “to see the students who are on the team, they don’t really have the perspective of how much they know and how much they have been learning, but once they get out of the team their eyes get opened to how much they really got out of the experience.” Travis also comments on how “it’s always satisfying and fun to have the alumni to come back over winter break after their first year of college and they will be so excited over what they know and everything.” These are the real reasons Travis mentors, and because of the steady cycle students coming through, he plans on doing this for many more years to come.
Works Cited
Chklovski, Tara. “Technology Is Bringing Back the Apprenticeship Model. It Just Has a Different Name - Mentoring.” The Huffington Post, TheHuffingtonPost.com, 3 Nov. 2014, www. huffingtonpost.com/tara-chklovski/technology-is-bringingba_b_6065814.html. Accessed 27 Apr. 2017. Schmidt, Ginger. Personal interview. 29 March 2017. Schuh, Travis. Personal interview. 9 March 2017. ---. Personal interview. 27 Apr 2017. Schuh, Wyn. Personal interview. 21 March 2017. Setty, Rajesh. “9 Characteristics of a Good Mentoring Relationship.” The Huffington Post, TheHuffingtonPost.com, 12 Feb. 2015, www.huffingtonpost.com/rajesh-setty/9-characteristicsof-a-good-mentoring-relationship_b_6674602.html. Accessed 27 Apr. 2017. Sneideman, Joshua M. “Feature Story.” Engaging Children in STEM Education EARLY! | Natural Start, Natural Start Allience , Dec. 2013, naturalstart.org/feature-stories/engagingchildren-stem-education-early. Accessed 27 Apr. 2017.
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hristopher Mintz is a junior at Mountain View High School, and taking courses at Freestyle Academy. He joined the Mountain View High School FIRST Robotics Competition team the summer before his freshman year. He spends a lot
of his time on the robotics team and can usually be found in their lab on the weekend working to build the robot with the rest of the team. Chris hopes to study mechanical engineering in college, but loves to diversify his skills and enjoys his time spent at Freestyle.
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