After the Game Plan for the season is released the first weekend of January, teams across the country spend their twelve week build season in engineering, testing, programming fervor — unpacking FRC’s 141-page game manual, testing various iterations of build and code material, keeping careful track of discoveries in the league’s required robotics notebook. 

For MetalCow, this means practicing for two and a half hours after school, four days a week, with an all-day practice on Saturdays.

Although coaches don’t expect students to come in for the entirety of the team’s daunting 16-hour work week, for rookie Andy Guzman (‘24), it’s worth it.

Like his teammates, Andy found his passion for STEM and coding in elementary school.

“I started with really basic block-based coding,” Andy said, referring to the style of visual programming common among beginner coders. “With MetalCow, it’s now Java programming, but it’s still the same wonder that inspired me from the beginning.”

Part of what makes this wonder so special, Andy says, is the community that fosters it. 

At first — as a rookie — Andy was uncertain of his place on the team.

It quickly became clear that he had nothing to fear: “the community [was] so welcoming,” Andy said, “I really [felt] encouraged to speak up and offer my ideas to help improve the team.”

As a veteran competitor, Gokul is key in creating that atmosphere — making it a point to ensure each teammate is equally valued. 

“Especially with robotics, there’s no way one person alone can write all the code or build the entire robot, right?” Gokul said. “Each person plays their own part and then it all comes together…[that’s] really cool to watch.”

In the final six weeks of MetalCow’s build season, the team begins traveling across the country, competing in scrimmages for a chance to qualify for the Worlds competition.

In its decade-long history, MetalCow has become one of the best teams in the state of Illinois—they’ve qualified for the Worlds Championships for three consecutive years. 

But for these students, their greatest lessons go beyond their success in competition. 

“There’s a lot of passion in the competitions,” Dhruv said, “but [even though] you’re competing on the field, off the field you learn from [your] competitors…and [build] friendships.”

Andy attributes these bonds to one of the core values of FIRST robotics: “cooperation.”

“It’s cooperation and competition,” Andy said. “So the goal is that you work with other [teams] to make everyone better instead of just making your team the best it can be.”