The Time of Robots
Newsletter 2025-02-14
After school activities are different than they used to be. Back when I was a kid, the only sport was banging two rocks together. The goal wasn’t to make a spark. Fire hadn’t been invented yet. We simply knocked them together because we like the sound. Today, two of my girls are in robotics clubs. I don’t entirely understand the rules, which makes sense. I still don’t completely comprehend that whole fire thing. I’ll have a better chance to grasp robotics tomorrow, when I’ll spend all day watching my twelve-year-old compete. Hopefully she’s actually been building and programming a robot and it wasn’t all a ruse for something more unseemly, like underground rap battles or street graffiti. I can’t wait to find out if I’m raising a nerd or the next Banksy.
Mae wasn’t supposed to be in robotics. She was helped along by a renegade teacher who plays by his own rules. He’ll do anything if it’s for the kids. I assume he sits on chairs backwards, the highest level of cool. He runs a bunch of activities after school. One of them is a robotics club he started up himself. It’s at an elementary school we’re not zoned for, but he did some behind the scenes magic to get my middle schooler involved. I’ve been assured that it’s within the rules—as long as nobody checks into what the rules actually are. It’s all for the greater good, unless Mae kicks off the robot apocalypse. That wouldn’t be very good at all.
Mae has been working diligently on her secret robot project. In the fall, she’d get home from middle school on the bus, hop on her bike, and ride across town to the elementary school to start programming. When it got cold, transportation duties fell to me. That’s my only role as a parent. If kids could have driver’s licenses, they would raise themselves. Mae and her teammates assembled the robot from a kit. Then they used a kid-friendly coding app to give it commands. It’s supposed to scoop up a ball and move it to a target zone. Each ball is worth a point. The team with the most points after a certain number of rounds wins. It all seems overly complicated. It would be more straightforward if the robots simply fought each other. Our school system isn’t ready for mechanized MMA. That will have to wait until college.
Mae has to be there tomorrow. If all three girls don’t show up, the team will automatically be disqualified. There have already been some close calls. The flu has been rampaging around the area like one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. One of Mae’s teammates was out of school for half of the week. The robotics teacher recruited a backup student for the squad just in case. They didn’t do any of the work, but they would travel with the team if necessary to help them meet the required headcount. That would be both very selfless and extremely realistic. Every group project has one person who does none of the work but shares the credit. It’s the most accurate simulation of what it’s like to have coworkers.
