Club of the Month: Robotics Club
If you’ve happened upon the engineering lab in The Revers Center this fall, you may have noticed the steady hum of 3D printers and the gentle whirring of material management systems churning colorful spools of filament for a multitude of projects. It is a traditional classroom, but with an innovative and vibrant energy fitting for a room in Wonka’s fantastical chocolate factory. And it’s home to the Upper School Robotics Club, which meets twice a week around midday.
The Upper School Robotics Club offers a space for students to turn digital concepts into reality. Seniors who want to take their interest even further can enroll in robotics as an official elective, but the club itself welcomes anyone from Grade 9 through Grade 12 who’s ready to design and construct.
At the start of the year, club members are assigned groups for the sole purpose of conserving inventory for each project. Over time, as natural attrition happens throughout the year, there is more opportunity to work on individual robots. Members have the opportunity to build freely, and individual robot designs vary widely based on student interest.
Club co-leader Blake Saint Louis ’28 has been developing a stair-climbing robot that uses custom 3D-printed gear linkages to scale obstacles. Meanwhile, club co-leader Matthew Gundersheimer ’27 is adapting tank treads for a bulldozer-style robot designed to push objects around. Meanwhile, Upper School science teacher and robotics coordinator Yoshi Fujita built an iPad-controlled robot featuring wheels for lateral motion that is just plain fun to operate.
These creations will soon be put to the test in a custom race course spanning across the two attached rooms that make up the engineering lab—a challenge that will evolve throughout the year as new obstacles and tasks are added to test maneuverability.
Much of this creative freedom is powered by a massive upgrade in the lab's fabrication capacity. The school recently added eight high-speed 3D printers, reducing print times from two hours down to 30 to 60 minutes. Combined with a donation of two large-format printers from a local business, the lab now houses 14 3D printers.
“There are more, and they’re a lot smarter—with sensors and cameras—which will reduce material waste and failed prints quite a bit,” says Fujita. “We have these material management systems with different spools of filament loaded; when one runs out, it will just pick up with the next one, whereas it used to be the print would just stop when it ran out.”
Beyond the club, the lab supports the broader STEM program at Rivers, including the Grade 10 STEM Seminar (offering project-based tracks in engineering, robotics, computer science, and data science) and senior electives. Across all these programs, the underlying philosophy remains the same: mastering digital fabrication and rapid prototyping.
“It’s right there in the name,” Fujita explains. “Digital: You design it on the computer. Fabrication: You make it in real life. What it lets you do is iterate rapidly on your ideas, so you can have a part within minutes to hours that you can test, figure out what’s not working, and make improvements again and again and again.”
The goal is to encourage students to confront their assumptions through rapid experimentation rather than overthinking. Through trial and error and constant reinvention, the Robotics Club contributes to one of the most active and creative hubs on campus.
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