Benilde-St.Margaret’s has multiple summer trips but one trip that is fun and competitive is the RoboCup summer trip. You need to be in engineering three or four as a prerequisite for the summer trip. You will learn a lot of new skills by helping build the robot for RoboCup.

Engineering teacher Charles Nepomuceno teaches engineering students throughout the summer in preparation for RoboCup. “At the start of the summer we are working here in our shop to finish the robot. So there’s a lot of final fabrication work and maybe some design changes and some programming that has to go on to get the robot done. But then as we go, July usually is when we travel to RoboCup. From there we’ll actually fly over to wherever the competition is and we will do the whole RoboCup competition,” Nepomuceno said.

If you wonder what the price is like and if you can afford it then no worries. “It’s definitely not a drop in the hat for everyone. But yes, students can afford it and we also are trying to work on some fundraising to make it work,” Nepomuceno said.

A good amount of students go and can get recognized by colleges. “A lot of students anywhere from 16 to 25 and the reasoning is one, to get student exposure also for students who are really required for the Robot to stay functional, I think those are the two main points of having a team and then giving students the exposure to be able to do this kind of stuff,” Nepomuceno said.

You can gain a lot of things by doing RoboCup, especially new skills. “I’ve gained an engineering portion and I’ve just gained new leadership and how to work with a team,” senior engineering student Kent Gerads said.

Not every student that helps goes on the trip every year, it depends on if you want to go or not. “From our team this year, no one has actually gone so it’s going to be a completely new experience for everyone including Mr. Nepo, so it’ll be pretty interesting,” Gerads said.

There are a lot of fun things to do when it comes to helping and some can be stressful. “Both fun and stressful was our qualification video week. It was a lot of very long days but it was really fun hanging out with the team, working on getting our qualification video filmed,” Gerads said.