South Eugene Robotics team and its STEM-focused students start season with impressive win

A local high school robotics team is on track for a great season, going undefeated in its first competition this year and ranking first out of nearly 30 teams in the Pacific Northwest.

South Eugene Robotics Team is the only FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Competition team in the Eugene/Springfield area. At its first tournament in Salem, SERT went undefeated across 17 matches, making it one of only 10 undefeated teams out of more than 2,100 in the robotics league worldwide.

This is a huge feat, potentially promising their best season yet, according to Cinco Murchison, SERT co-captain and senior at South Eugene High.

"It can be pretty tough to stay undefeated and win every match like that," Murchison said. "We were able to be really consistent. Our pit crew, repairing our robot after matches if anything broke, did a really awesome job. Our electrical team did a great job doing systems checks and keeping everything reliable. It was a joint effort to keep everything working."

While it is named after the school its workshop is housed in, SERT is open to students from any high schools in the area. It is not affiliated with South Eugene High, nor does it receive funding from the school district. The majority of the 45 students go to South Eugene High, but several current members are from North Eugene High, Sheldon High and Pleasant Hill High.

With dozens of students in the club at a time all working on one robot, it can take a lot of coordinating to get everyone on track. Murchison said the competition aspect pushes the team to do their best and work together every step of the way.

"It's really cool to have such a large group of people that are able to come in quite often and work together on such a big project," Murchison said. "We just all put so much time and effort into (it) and then see it pay off from the competition season."

While the competition is a draw for some, for others, it's more about sticking with the team.

Callaway Macovis, SERT co-captain and senior at South Eugene High, said winning means more opportunities to continue competing as a team.

"Look around at us, we're a bunch of nerds," Macovis said. "It's kind of weird and awesome to find a group of people who think kind of like you do. I really enjoy being a part of this team... This is the best opportunity, locally, to do that.

"It's cool to win, especially undefeated, but we only spend a tiny amount of time at competition; we spend a lot of time as a team," he said. "I would have had just as good a time if we had lost."

More about SERT

SERT was formed in 2007 by a South Eugene student. It aims to offer expanded STEM opportunities to all students in the area, as many high schools lack shop, mechanics or engineering classes. But thanks to sponsors and donors, SERT lets students try their hand at many skills: mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, design, business and more.

What makes SERT especially unique is that the majority of these skills are passed directly from student to student. For example, Murchison said he and his brother spent their summer adapting an online training curriculum for the club.

Paul Dassonville has been a mentor for SERT for the last eight years. Dassonville is an associate professor at the University of Oregon's Institute of Neuroscience, not a professional engineer, although he does have some experience, having studied biomedical engineering "way back" in his undergrad years. After his oldest son joined the club, Dassonville decided to help out as a mentor, planning to leave when his children graduated out, but he couldn't tear himself away.

He said he gets to see the students grow, many having no experience with engineering when they start, but becoming inspired through their teammates. Dassonville said the energy at the competitions is unmatched — students, friends and families fill school gyms, cheering on each robot.

"I get to live vicariously through them, and experience all the emotions that they experience," Dassonville said. "I learn so much from the team, I've taken on new skills, because of the skills that I've learned from them."

Dassonville said most of the mentors on the team, like himself, have little to no experience in engineering. When it comes to the robots, 99.9% of the work is done solely by the students, he said.

SERT's latest robot, Marvin, a 150 lb. robot that costs roughly $6,000, took home gold on March 10.

Each year, FIRST puts out the guidelines of its challenge for the robots. This year, robots had to place or shoot foam hoops into a designated slot or goal about eight feet high, then climb a chain using their own arms, according to Murchison.

The teams only have a few weeks to read a 200-page rules manual, then design, make prototypes, build and code before finalizing their robots for the competition.

Dassonville said the ending of that build period can get chaotic. Nowadays, they've been able to streamline their builds so they're "only" working about 30 hours a week near the end, but in earlier years, at least some students were working up to 40 hours a week.

Outside of competition season, the students run their own recruitment drives, urging students to join the club. While school is out, they host Go Baby Go summer camps for younger students and do other types of volunteering. During the fall, Macovis said the upperclassmen teach younger and new students essential skills, so by the time competition season comes around in the spring, they can be more involved.

"Your first year on the team, you generalize a lot, because you're just kind of extra hands to help out where needed," Macovis said. "Your second or third year on the team, you tend to find tasks that are more niche."

SERT is split into sub-teams, each with its own leader: mechanical, electrical, software, computer-aided design, media, business, safety and strategy.

"We've got a lot of different areas for students, a lot of different technical skills for people to learn," Murchison said. "It provides an opportunity for everyone to find something that they like."

Looking to expand

At their first competition, SERT also took home the Engineering Inspiration Award, which celebrates the ways engineering can benefit communities and solve important problems. This was due to the team's work on Go Baby Go, a program that provides modified electric cars to children ages 0-3 who experience limited mobility, and their new Grow Baby Grow initiative, which creates adaptive toys for children with different mobility needs.

Sophia Hoffman, SERT business team lead and South Eugene High senior, said Grow Baby Grow was her personal project. It takes toys off the shelf and adapts them in a way that's more accessible to all children. SERT has held two workshops this year on these adaptive toys and ways to use them.

"(I joined SERT because) I was interested in all the cool technology stuff ... it's really easy to get fascinated by all of that," Hoffman said. "But then I shifted over into the business perspective because I saw all the fabulous things that we were doing business-wise and for the community. That really resonated with me."

Hoffman said the business team helps manage SERT's budget with the help of mentors. She also said SERT has been advocating for state funding of school-based robotics programs. There used to be funding for these programs at the state level, but it was rescinded in 2020. About half of SERT went to Salem during the legislative session, asking for that funding to be restored.

But even with all these duties, SERT and the business team are looking to support even more robotics programs outside its own. While Dassonville said he's happy SERT represents the Eugene/Springfield area, he wishes there were more FRC teams around.

"We would love to have more teams here because in FIRST robotics ... the community that you have is not only within the team, it's across teams," Dassonville said. "They have this idea of gracious professionalism, where the idea is that everyone can reach further if everyone is trying to get to that goal and helping each other get to that goal."

While there are some lower-level robotics teams at the middle/high and elementary levels, SERT is the only one in its class in the area. Dassonville said SERT has been trying to support those lower-level FIRST Tech Challenge (middle/high) and FIRST Lego League (elementary) programs.

Dassonville said mentors are needed to get these teams off the ground and encouraged those interested to reach out to SERT or FIRST.

During last year's Go Baby Go summer camps, one of the groups was exclusive to female and gender non-conforming middle schoolers. Often, STEM fields are male-dominated, so this was an effort to open up pathways for new groups to try out robotics and engineering. According to Hoffman, it was a huge success. She said the ratio of female and gender non-conforming students jumped from 32% in 2022 to 58% in 2023. Some of those students then went on to form their own FTC group, the Digital Dragons.

"They had just a phenomenal season," Dassonville said. "They struggle(d) to even get their robot to move even just a couple of weeks before their first competition, and then suddenly it's working and they ended up kind of middle of the pack in their final competition, which, for a rookie team, is amazing."

For SERT, their competition season is just ramping up. Students are hoping for a smooth season and to make it, again, to the FIRST World's competition in Houston, which they went to last year.

"Every year, (their) knowledge base is stacking up, and that's, I think, primarily why we're seeing our success skyrocket these last few years," Dassonville said. "Each of the last three years has been the best year ever. It just has gotten better and better."

SERT's next competition is at Wilsonville High School south of Portland on Saturday and Sunday.

Miranda Cyr reports on education for The Register-Guard. You can contact her at mcyr@registerguard.com or find her on Twitter @mirandabcyr.

This article originally appeared on Register-Guard: South Eugene Robotics Team wins big at 2024 FIRST tournament