Emily Gardner cannot wait for the school day to end. Not because she’ll then be free to go home and play video games, browse the Internet, or do whatever it is that most high school students do after the final bell rings. Emily — a perpetually smiling, endlessly encouraging junior who serves as Team Leader — won’t be going home. Not after school today, or the next day, or the next day. 
She’ll be sleeping in the classroom of her SAIL High School physics teacher along with roughly twenty other members of the magnet school’s robotics club. The girls will be in one room and the boys in another, with the teacher, Jasun Burdick, and his wife Wendy sleeping in the classroom as well. 
It’s near the end of Build Season, after all, and the Farrell Beast still needs some late-stage adjustments.
	SAIL (School for Arts and Innovative Learning) High School was founded in 1975. Its open-air campus is adorned with murals of Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King Jr. and other seminal figures as well as works of art made by SAIL students. The school’s academic history is littered with “A” and “B” ratings from the Florida Department of Education. SAIL’s emphasis traditionally was on — as the name suggests — the arts and creative expression. However, the Competitive Robotics Club (team name: The Octo-Pi-Rates) is changing how the school is perceived entirely.
	“I guess the local community thinks about SAIL as a strong school for the arts,” said Principal Dave Crandall. “I’d like to think that [the club] shows that our students are also involved in some pretty sophisticated math, science and technology.”
	The status of her school’s reputation, though, is not what drives Ms. Gardner to work all afternoon and night before sleeping on a hard floor for four hours and then waking up, going to classes, and doing it all again the next day. It’s not the reason why senior Hazel Moore has dyed her hair purple and green — the team colors — nor why she gives inflamed, passionate speeches about the need for more women in science and math fields. It’s most definitely not the reason why the two girls — and many more Octo-Pi-Rates — have decided to pursue engineering degrees, a thought that would have never crossed their minds before the Robotics Club entered, shook up, and, for six weeks a year, dominated their lives.
	No, to understand that kind of drastic transformation you need to start with a physics teacher who lives in a co-op, a life-altering question he asked his class in the fall of 2010, and a student-built, student-operated robot that shoots basketballs better than most human beings.
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	Jasun Burdick was a student at the University of Central Florida when he was introduced to the manic subculture that is the FIRST Robotics Competition.
 	“I didn’t really know what it was,” said Burdick. “I just thought it was this cool thing that would be fun to help out with.”
	What Burdick helped out with then — and what his team is working towards now — is the Orlando Regional branch of a robotics competition that last year saw 2,075 teams from 11 countries participate. The FIRST Robotics Competition is put on by the nonprofit charity FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), which was founded in 1989 by Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway personal transporter. The competition, which FIRST bills as “The varsity sport for the mind,” started in 1992 in a Pennsylvania high school gymnasium. Since then, the competition — and, with it, competitive high school robotics as a whole — has grown by leaps and bounds. To say that the competition has spawned a subculture is no exaggeration: Online businesses such as andymark.com have sprung up to accommodate parts needs; Burdick, who is in his fourth year teaching at SAIL, regularly communicates with other teams in Florida; and an Orlando-based squad will be treating the Octo-Pi-Rates and teams from Austria and Brazil to a large banquet-style dinner before the competition. Most notably, there is an eight-year-old online discussion forum dedicated to all things related to the competition. The Octo-Pi-Rates have two team members checking and posting on the site regularly; overall, thousands of students are on the forum every day, asking and answering questions to and from other teams. The winners of the regional competitions held around the country go on to nationals, held in the Edwards Jones Dome in St. Louis, Mo. There they vie for the mythical title of FIRST Championship Winner.
	But Burdick knew none of this when he applied for a $6,000 grant from JCPenney last year. Burdick applies for several grants every school year, but he was surprised when his application was accepted by JCPenney. It wasn’t until later that Burdick realized the competition that the money applied to was the same one he had volunteered for years ago. He simply knew that he suddenly had thousands of dollars at his disposal, dollars that would only be useful if students committed to the cause. So Burdick asked that fateful question.
	“I said, ‘Hey,’ to my physics class, ‘want to build a robot?’” said Burdick. “And they were all for it.”
	Burdick and his students did not know exactly what they were getting into. FIRST Robotics Competitions feature a single game, lasting two minutes, that teams play repeatedly over the three days of competition. This year’s game requires that the robots be able to shoot a basketball into hoops placed at three different heights. Teams learn the game format and receive their standardized parts kit at the beginning of January. There is a strict period of six weeks, called Build Season, during which work on the robot can be done. Last year Burdick’s team was not ready for the intensity of those six weeks.
“We weren’t prepared for everything that was going to go wrong,” said senior Dylan Phelps, the chief driver on the team both this year and last. “We thought ‘Oh you know, you put a few pieces together and it’ll work!’” Phelps now shakes his head at such naiveté. The team also wasn’t ready for the long hours of commitment that building Roger — last year’s robot — would take. Sleeping at school as Build Season winds down may be considered normal in the world of FIRST Robotics, but the Octo-Pi-Rates were at school until late at night last year for a majority of the six weeks.
“We tried to leave earlier this year, basically for the janitors’ sanity,” said Gardner. 
At last year’s competition, the Octo-Pi-Rates had to deal with a multitude of mechanical failures and an entirely new programming code that had been installed only days earlier. FIRST Robots are controlled by a joystick which sends signals to a wireless internet router attached to the bot. The computer code must be written by the teams themselves. Because the code determines whether or not the robot even moves, the team’s failure last year to grasp the new code meant Roger could only sit there, hundreds of hours of work left stationary on the competition floor.
“By the end of the first day, when the robot still hadn’t moved, there were kids crying,” said Burdick. “Kids were breaking down in the parking lot. We were doing lots of therapy.”
	Still, the Octo-Pi-Rates were able to overcome these problems to finish fifth out of the fifteen teams that made their FIRST debut in 2011. That would not have been possible if not for the help of other teams at the competition.
FIRST places heavy emphasis on what it calls “Gracious Professionalism,” which is the idea that any and every team in the FIRST network is really working towards a common goal: learning. To best achieve that goal, then, every team helps one another whenever possible. Perhaps the most surprising manifestation of Gracious Professionalism came at the competition itself: Last year the Octo-Pi-Rates faced mechanical failures that could have been crippling until teams of strangers heard about their problems and happily donated parts — over $300 worth — to help the team get back on track. If a FIRST team comes across a problem and doesn’t have the know-how to fix it, experts from other teams come directly into their Pit — the 10’ x 10’ space assigned to each team for on-site robot repairs — and walks them through the process. It’s not like the sportsmanship mantra that other high school sports claim to strive for; the robotics teams really buy into Gracious Professionalism throughout the whole process, and the Octo-Pi-Rates are eager to use the knowledge they’ve obtained over these two years to help the new crop of rookie teams at competition this year.
“That’s what I like about FIRST,” said Cory Jackson, a calmly confident senior who specializes in the mechanics of the robot. “It’s more about cooperation than anything else.” 
“People were coming by every ten minutes saying, ‘Do you need help?’” explained Burdick. “If their team didn’t have a guy who knew how to [solve a problem], they knew someone else who did, and they’d bring him over. It was,” Burdick paused a moment, searching for the right word, “astonishing.”
	Still, the Octo-Pi-Rates hope that they won’t have to rely on Gracious Professionalism as much this time around. The team has experienced tremendous growth and development in this, just their second year of existence. One can see this just by comparing Roger with this year’s robot, nicknamed “The Farrell Beast” after John Farrell, a technical designer from FSU’s renowned magnet lab who helps out with the club. The club will always be proud of Roger — their very first robot — but the Farrell Beast looks as though it was built by an entirely different group. Roger is basically a flat base covered in a tangle of wires and supporting thin wood pieces that hold a hook, which was used in last year’s game. The Farrell Beast is a shining structure of Plexiglas, motors, conveyors and a powerful flywheel. It shoots basketballs with ruthless efficiency.
	The club has developed so well mostly because of their learning experience last year. Students have a better idea of what they’re doing this year. Burdick’s room during Build Season becomes a busy nest of quizzical yet confident voices batting around ideas and solutions. Students rush to and fro from station to station, where different problems are being tackled by different groups. Saws buzz and grind sporadically. Burdick is the mobile hub of this activity; he’s constantly fielding questions or working on various problems. Sometimes his toddler-aged daughter comes up to him with a newfound trinket. He takes the time to pick her up and give her attention. She’ll wander off to be alternately looked after and played with by the high-schoolers. Tea and Indian food is simmering in one section of Burdick’s room. The club sits down for dinner everyday like a family. The routine is more comfortable, expectations are better understood.
Burdick attributes some of the club’s rapid development to the learning atmosphere at SAIL High. As a magnet school, SAIL often does not have the same type of burdensome bureaucratic difficulties that other schools deal with. The Octo-Pi-Rates have received donations of fairly heavy machinery without having to go through the paperwork and subsequent waiting period that other teams might. Burdick stresses that SAIL’s accommodating environment makes the entire building process easier for the club: 
“At a normal school there’s so many steps you have to go through that it’s just frustrating,” said Burdick. “It’s not like that at SAIL. [For example,] I want to bring three kids over to Lively [Technical Center] to learn how to weld. I go to Dave [Crandall] and say, ‘Is it okay if they’re welding?’ And he says, ‘Sure. Just make sure they’re safe.’” Inhibitive bureaucracy is the reason why many FIRST clubs do not directly associate themselves with high schools, choosing instead to meet and work outside of school.
	My second visit to the club came on the very last day of Build Season. This was the end of the four-day period that saw students and teacher sleeping at school after working obsessively for hours to make last-minute adjustments that would make the Farrell Beast as good as it could possibly be. The excited countenances I saw previously had been replaced by furrowed brows and tired eyes. 
	“It’s been hard physically and mentally,” said Gardner. “But it’s getting done.” 
	On this day, the club saw the Farrell Beast shoot a ball for the first time. The mood was a bit tense; surely some of them thought about the pain and frustration of working hundreds of hours last year only to see Roger freeze up for a day in Orlando. This robot has been everything they’ve worked towards for the past six weeks. Every one of them had sacrificed enormously to get to this point. The ball was loaded and started making its way towards the spinning flywheel. There was a hearty cheer when the Farrell Beast’s very first shot went in.
	“I made the announcement today: We’re going to Nationals,” said Gardner, smiling at her own boldness. “We’re going to Nationals.”
	While the Farrell Beast has been the center of these students’ universe for the past six weeks, there’s an element of the FIRST Robotics Competition that goes beyond even that beautiful basket-shooting machine. The level of technical knowledge and real-life skills that these students are learning throughout this process blows regular high school curriculums out of the water. Student after student will tell you how FIRST has changed their lives.
	From Gardner: “I was always a poor student at math because I’m dyslexic. Then I got in here and I could see it, see how it would work. [The club] made math important to me. I went back to math class and started going better, started applying myself.”
	From Hazel Moore: “I was always good at math, but I didn’t really like it. I had the equations memorized, but then Build Season started and I could see it everywhere: This is what we talked about in physics! This is how you solve for torque!” Three weeks after this conversation, Hazel would receive, through FIRST’s scholarship program, $5,000 to attend Embry-Riddle University, a school that specializes in aviation and aerospace technology.
	Victoria Rogers grew up in Washington, where she participated in her high school’s FIRST team for three years. Rogers, now a freshman at FSU, visits the Octo-Pi-Rates daily, helping the club in any way she can. During my first visit with the club, Rogers — a soft-spoken yet articulate girl — entered the room with a cheery announcement: “I made vegan cupcakes for everyone!” When Rogers moved to Florida to attend FSU, she says that one of the first things she did was look up local FIRST teams on the Internet. She’s still learning things through the SAIL club that surpass the intricacy of her college mechanical engineering classes. Rogers gushed about the impact FIRST has had on her life.
	“I initially wanted to be a doctor, go into biology,” says Rogers. “I wouldn’t have even thought about being an engineer without this program. FIRST is probably the best thing that’s happened to my life thus far. It’s shaping the rest of my life.” Gardner, standing nearby, chimes in. “Same here, same here.”
	Anyone who visits the Octo-Pi-Rates will inevitably hear these types of stunning, sweeping remarks made by one of the students. The first impulse is to skeptically check them for disingenuousness; one might expect any eager student to say this sort of optimistic, grandiose thing to someone who says they’re from a newspaper. But the team members will look you in the eye and nod, tell you emphatically again and again that yes, it’s true. This high school club that takes up all of their free time and isolates them from the rest of the world is, genuinely, the best thing that’s ever happened to them.
	“It’s very hard to understand unless you’re in it,” said Rogers. “I didn’t have that many friends in high school; when I joined the robotics team, they became my best friends. I didn’t have very good grades before [joining the robotics club]. I ended up graduating salutatorian of my high school because of this.”
	Burdick points to the fact that five out of seven of the Octo-Pi-Rate seniors are planning on studying in engineering fields. His team leader, Gardner, is also planning on studying engineering. Though only a junior, she has a more detailed career plan than many people five or six years her senior.
	“I’m personally looking into Florida Institute of Technology,” said Gardner, “because I know I want to come back to SAIL and teach. I’m going off of the STEM scholarships and the FIRST scholarships so I can come back here and do this.”  
	STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mechanics. It’s a term that all of these students have come to be familiar with, and it encompasses fields many of them might one day work in. But that’s all stuff to be dealt with later. Right now the Octo-Pi-Rates are getting ready for March 8, the first day of the Regional Competition. They’re making buttons and flags that feature the drawing of a pirate octopus which serves as the team’s official logo. They’re resting their tired bodies and minds, recovering from a six-week period that was probably harder than anything else they’ll do this year. Above all, they’re getting ready to guide the Farrell Beast through competition and cheer as their robot competes, watch with a sense of satisfaction caused by something much, much deeper than just the sight of their beloved creation in action, sinking hoop after hoop after hoop.