In room 6205 after school every Tuesday, members from Liberty’s LRC-II classroom and Liberty’s robotics team, the Iron Patriots, work together to build and code competitive LEGO robots that they will eventually put head-to-head on November 17 at the Washington Unified Robotics Championship hosted at Liberty High School.
The teams get seven weeks of meetings to make their robots in groups of two–one athlete, and one partner. During this time, they receive their challenge, construct their bot, and code it to compete in the challenge.
“Athletes and partners get to work together as they learn robotics. We use LEGO Spike Prime and EV3 kits and program them for a specifically crafted competition released each year,” Unified Lead Rei Gilbert said. “This year’s game is based off of a 1960s cartoon called Wacky Racers. The field is a rectangle with a bar in the middle, and two robots are going to race around for three laps, but teams can have an extra piece on their robot that can be deployed as a way to sabotage other bots.”
Unified Robotics works with Special Olympics of Washington to create opportunities for students with intellectual disabilities who may not get an adequate chance to learn and use STEM-related skills during their everyday learning. The Iron Patriots are one of two ambassadors of Unified, where they educate other teams on the program and help them start it at their own schools.
“Unified Robotics started before I was at Liberty,” Robotics President Akash Krishna said. “Our advisor, Mr. Oney, worked with some students to set up Unified Robotics teams at our school, and for the past seven years, we’ve had around two to four Unified Robotics teams per season.”
Krishna has been a part of Unified for the past three years, and made major contributions to the expansion of the program. At booths during competitions, on Zoom meetings at home, and even at a Unified conference at the FIRST World Championships in 2024, word of Unified programs has been spreading just about everywhere the Liberty team travels.
“I feel like Unified Robotics has grown my awareness of different groups of people and how to better understand and work with them,” Gilbert said.
Being a part of Unified introduces students to a new community full of individuals who are simply showing up to learn, have fun, and win!
“Usually the response to people with intellectual disabilities is a natural discomfort, but being around them and even being friends with them was really important to me,” Krishna said. “These people we’re working with, the athletes, they’re not going to judge you because they’ve been judged so many times in their life, so you’re working with people that are very authentic and true to themselves, people who won’t put you down for being yourself.”
