‘Thunderbots’ team builds robots with help from JPL mentor

A few years ago, 17-year-old Kaitlyn Waldman was pressured to join FIRST robotics team 980, much to her disliking.

The 14-year-old team, also known as the “ThunderBots,” is made up of a group of high school students from Glendale, Burbank and nearby schools who compete with teens across the Los Angeles region within a 45-day time span as they build robots to perform specific tasks.

It was Kaitlyn’s neighbor, a former mentor for the team, who suggested Kaitlyn join it, and her parents pushed her to follow through.

“I actually hated math,” she said. Believing she was never going to “use” math, she admitted, “I was really, really wrong. I went from hating math to loving it. This is my number-one priority all the time.”

After participating in her first robotics competition, Kaitlyn decided she would stay on the team. In her sophomore year, she knew she wanted to become an engineer.

Now a senior, and the ThunderBots’ team captain, Kaitlyn happily makes the trek from her home in Granada Hills to Glendale at least twice a week to work on robots with her peers in a warehouse used by Walt Disney Imagineering, the team’s biggest sponsor.

Burroughs High School senior Mia Datuin, 17, was also talked into joining the team by her classmate Ryan Aguiar, a fellow Burroughs senior.

“It’s like an academic sports team. It’s really cool,” she said.

Aguiar is president of the Burroughs robotics club and hopes someday the campus will offer robotics classes during the school day.

On Tuesday evening, he and other team members set aside three hours to transfer parts of a robot they built for last spring’s competition onto another robot with improved capabilities.

“They’ve become like another family to me,” Aguiar said of team 980. “I see all my friends: They have soccer, they have choir. They’ve got dance. I’ve got robotics.”

Team 980 also has some of the most skilled mentors any robotics team could have, including David Brinza, a project engineer who spends his daytime hours tracking high-energy radiation from a device attached to Mars’ Curiosity Rover for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

In light of his expertise, and that of fellow mentors, students are welcome to join without any experience whatsoever.

“We’ve had to teach some kids how to use a screwdriver,” Brinza said.

Brinza also reminds students of NASA’s commitment to the team and others like it.

“There’s probably a dozen teams that have mentors that are from JPL … NASA has actually provided grants to teams … We tell them that NASA is doing this as an investment in the future, that basically, we’re trying to develop a workforce.”

Verdugo Hills High senior Christopher Harris, 17, grew up building model airplanes and constructing pieces with Legos, never paying mind to the instructions that came in the box.

Since he’s been part of team 980, he’s learned computer-aided design, the ability to turn a physical drawing into a computer model to scale.

He said the Verdugo Hills High robotics program isn’t as robust as he would like it to be, but that’s why he’s grateful about team 980 and the skills he’s learned that he believes will make him stand out when he pursues a professional career in engineering.

“I like the whole team aspect of it, being able to work on something with people who kind of think like you do and just brainstorming and coming up with ideas for things. The whole teamwork thing is a big help, learning how to interact and take charge of certain situations … If anybody feels like their school or situation just isn’t presenting them with things they’d like, they should really branch out and come here.”