The Highlands Intermediate Robotics Team is an after school club where students engage in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics).  We learn how to design, build, program, and redesign robots.  We meet at Highlands Intermediate in Pearl City, Hawaii after school and on Saturdays.  Membership is open to all students.  Our advisor is Ms. Joan Okai and our mentor is Mr. Allen Toma.

          We started in 2005 when our team participated in the 2006 Hawaii Botball Regional Tournament.  We have been entering that competition ever since.  We’ve also entered the National Botball Research and Website Design Challenge every year it had been offered and the International Botball Tournament for the two years it was in Hawaii.  We have two Botball teams.

          VEX came to Hawaii in 2008 bringing driver control to robotics.  We’ve qualified for the VEX World Championship for the past ten years, and just qualified this year.  We have hosted multiple VEX IQ qualifying tournaments with Pearl City High School, the 2015 Hawaii State VEX High School Championship, and have had many robotics and STEM presentations like at the Schools of the Future Conference.  Ms.Okai, our advisor, went to Maui and Molokai to host workshops to help new teams get started with VEX and VEX IQ.  She helped to run a VEX IQ tournament on Kauai.  She’s always helping other teams during competitions.

          This year our team has co-hosted the Leeward VEX IQ Tournament and will co-host another VEX IQ Tournament post season where we have redesigned the game for teams that did not qualify for States.  We also have volunteered at our school as guides for Registration Day, at our PTSA's fundraising event, and at the Pearl City Public Library's Volunteer Day where we were the guides and helped with set up and break down.

          Robotics has given us opportunities we would never have had if we hadn’t joined.  It teaches us time management, how to work well with others, taking responsibility, and many other things.  We hope we can continue to work on both VEX and Botball for years to come.  We are proud to know we have built the foundation on which Pearl City High School Robotics is built on.