The FHS Learn.Robotics Club is a once-a-week lunch club held in Mr. Garcia’s room (J-2). We teach robotics in a friendly, classroom-like atmosphere. Unlike many other high school robotics clubs, we focus on learning and not competition. Our core principles are:

  • Learning before competition. Although we are happy to coach any club member for a competition (our favorite is RoboRAVE because it doesn’t restrict competitors to one platform), it’s also fine if you just want to learn robotics without the added stress of competing.

  • Simple and elegant design. While it may be tempting to build a 6-axis CNC robotic arm with AI and computer vision in order to pick cherries, a simple motor to shake the tree works much better. Engineering is not about finding the most convoluted solution possible; it is about finding the best solution given all of the constraints.

  • Going deeper than the buzzwords. Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Machine Learning, TensorFlow… in the last few years, buzzwords have flooded the world of tech to a greater degree than ever before. However, much of the hype behind these concepts comes from over-eager corporate executives, not from real engineers. We believe in teaching future tech-industry workers how to look at corporate buzzwords with a more critical eye.

    • See our Jan. 17, 2020 lecture on “Why Aren’t Self-Driving Cars Perfect Yet?” The lecture goes over why certain engineering problems in the field of self-driving cars remain unsolved to this day.

Advisor

We’d like to extend a big thank-you to our club advisor, Mr. Francisco Garcia! He has been instrumental in getting us off the ground and letting us use his room at lunch. He teaches the Biology and Zoology classes at Foothill and has a variety of interesting animals in his room. His website is here.

Founding

The FHS Learn.Robotics Club started at the beginning of 2018-2019 school year (Oliver’s sophomore year).

Elections

Officer elections are held at the end of each school year.

Current Officers

  • Oliver Trevor - President, Founder, Main Lecturer

  • Nathan Lai - Vice-President

  • Lily Ren - Secretary

  • Adith Swarup - Treasurer

Previous Officers

  • Nick Jiang - Secretary for the 2018-2019 school year - voted out and replaced with Lily Ren