Robotics

I volunteer as a Programming Mentor for the Fullmetal Falcons, a cluster of FTC teams at Xavier High School in Middletown, CT. My son is in the class of 2028 there, and I started mentoring in 2024 during the Into the Deep season.

Why I Do This

Helping shape the next generation of engineers is one of the more satisfying ways I’ve found to contribute. The work is tangible—students iterate on real problems, ship something that competes, and grow in ways you can see. Unlike most of my professional work, where outcomes play out over months, robotics competitions provide immediate, unambiguous feedback.

I also enjoy the teaching itself. Explaining concepts to students forces me to understand them more clearly. If I can’t explain why a particular approach works, I probably don’t understand it as well as I thought.

What I’m Learning

Before this, the closest I came to bridging software and the physical world was wiring up ESP32 microcontrollers for home automation. Robotics has pushed me into mechanical and control concepts I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise.

One early win: with guidance from another mentor (Bob Gammons) on the mechanical side, I motorized the chute on my snow blower. The project combined mechanical design, motor control, and fabrication in a way that felt genuinely new. More on that project eventually—it deserves its own write-up.

The control systems work is particularly interesting. PID tuning, motion profiling, sensor fusion—these are concepts I understood abstractly but hadn’t implemented with real hardware constraints. Seeing a robot fail to do what the code says because the motors can’t actually accelerate that fast is a different kind of education than debugging software.

What I Didn’t Expect

Some of these students are sharp in ways that catch me off guard. There’s real value in being able to have technical conversations that skip the usual translation layer—discussions grounded in logic and pragmatic tradeoffs rather than abstraction. That kind of exchange is rare. I could count the adults I have it with on one hand.

I also didn’t expect how much the mentoring would reconnect me with why I like building things. When engineering becomes routine—when you’re operating systems more than creating them—it’s easy to forget the satisfaction of making something work for the first time. Watching students have that experience reminds me.

The Teaching Challenge

The hardest part isn’t the technical content—it’s calibrating explanations to meet students where they are. Different students have different backgrounds, different learning styles, different levels of comfort with abstraction. What works for one doesn’t work for another.

I’m still learning this. My instinct is to explain in terms of underlying principles, but sometimes students need concrete examples first and principles later. Sometimes they need to try something wrong to understand why the right way is better.

Related

• Home Assistant — Where I first experimented with hardware/software integration
• 3D Printing — Useful for fabricating robot parts and fixtures