Montville — It’s safe to say the St. Bernard Robotics Club has exceeded all expectations in its first year, even its own.

The club’s top team will fly out to Dallas, Texas, on Monday to participate in the three-day-long VEX Robotics World Championship at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center.

The club has enough members to support three total teams, which they named the A, B and W, but only the A team qualified for the world championship.

Though the club will not be the only one from the state participating, it will be the only club from southeastern Connecticut. Teams from Monroe, Masuk, Danbury and Weston also qualified for the competition.

Robotics is a branch of engineering that involves the design, creation and operation of robots to complete a given task, and VEX is the educational robotics company that creates the parts and sponsors events.

Sophomore William O’Donnell has navigated the club through its first year, which included five regional competitions in Connecticut and Massachusetts, the Southern New England VEX Robotics Championship High School Regional Championship in Massachusetts and the 2023 CREATE U.S. Open Robotics Championship in Iowa.

The club has taken home three awards from its previous competitions as it hunts for another at the world competition.

There would be no club without O’Donnell, who will lead the team into the competition with high school students from around the world.

O’Donnell moved to the state from Nebraska, where his father was stationed with the Navy, before the school year began. Before he stepped foot at St. Bernard School, he and his father contacted the school administration to create the after-school club. His previous school, Gross Catholic, had a robust robotics program that began in 2007-2008 school year, a year after VEX was created. He spent his eighth- and ninth-grade years with the club and fell in love with it all.

“I just loved it so much,” O’Donnell said. “It was so fun that I didn’t want to go to a school that didn’t have it.”

O’Donnell’s passion for building and programming is so strong that he often spends up to seven hours a day working on the club’s top bot, named 119A. Each school is assigned a number, and each robot within the club has a letter. The club also come up with a team name “Inflection.”

He said he has a free period at the end of every other school day and can start working on the red and black 18-cubic-inch robot at 1 p.m. He’ll stay at school till about 4 p.m. and go straight to swim practice, whether it be for the school or for the Connecticut Aquatics Club. Once he’s back home around 6:30 p.m., he said he continues to work until about 10:30 p.m.

He said he has plans to pursue a career in engineering and has interest in attending Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Mass., a Division III school that he may be able to continue his swimming career at as well.

“This does not feel like a chore or work to me at all. It’s what I love doing and I’m happy when I’m doing it,” O’Donnell said.

He shares his passion with the eight others in the club, and the club’s advisor Ann Marie Jakubielski, a computer science teacher and technology coordinator at the school.

“William has the experience,” Jakubielski said. “He’s been taking a lead on a lot of it, but showing everybody else the ropes as well.”

Jakubielski called the club’s creation a “perfect storm.” She used to use LEGO Mindstorms ― LEGO’s version of programming robots ― to teach portions of her classes. With LEGO discontinuing the line prior to the school year, the robotics club was there to help fill the void.

Though she is often called “Coach,” Jakubielski said she’s let O’Donnell lead the way though the clubs’s inception and slate of competitions. She said she’s loved the experience.

VEX Robotics competitions are played on a 12--by-12-foot square field, which O’Donnell and his father, Thomas, helped install at the school. They have their own field at their house.

Two alliances ― one “red” and one “blue” ― composed of two teams from different schools each compete in matches consisting of a 15-second autonomous period, which students will code programs for the robot to execute, followed by a one minute and 45 second driver controlled period.

The object of the game is to score more points than the opposing alliance by shooting discs into goals, spinning rollers to your team’s color and shooting strings to cover field tiles at the end of the match.

Jakubielski said one of her favorite parts of the club is seeing students problem solve on the fly. She said the teams often had to adjust strategies during competitions when the robot didn’t work as planned. Once, the bot was unable to score goals the way the team had thought it could, so the students shifted focus to spinning the rollers instead.

“That problem solving skill will take them through anything,” Jakubielski said.

O’Donnell pointed to a week in January before a competition in Killingly as a turning point for the club. Since the competition was in-state, all three of the club’s teams competed. It was the B-team’s first competition, and the W-team had only minimal experience.

O’Donnell said the week leading up to the Killingly competition was a mad dash of finalizing builds and fine-tuning programs. He and the club had more than one late night of work that week.

“(The week leading up to Killingly) wasn’t meant to be bonding, but it was a great bonding experience for the team to be able to solve the problems of getting the robot to work and programming and really good camaraderie,” O’Donnell said.

The hard work paid off as the secondary teams showed they were able to put out a competitive robot that could score goals, which it previously could not do. The A-team was already qualified for the regional competition by that point in the season, and O’Donnell enjoyed watching the others succeed.

“That moment for them, seeing them be able to problem solve and get it to do that was huge,” he said.

As part of a military family, O’Donnell said finding his place at a new school has become a familiar obstacle. With the robotics club, not only can he have a place in his new school, but he can help who were previously without a niche find one.

Freshman Ziyan “Tommy” Xu, one of the four members of the A-team going to Texas, said he always had an interest in computer programming and artificial intelligence and was excited to join the club after hearing about it during the school’s morning announcements.

Xu’s passion extended to an interest in the James Webb Telescope ― NASA’s largest space telescope that photographs objects in our solar system and beyond ― and with future plans to pursue an engineering career, he had aspirations to be part of a big project.

“I was thinking if I could be part of some big build,” Xu said. “And right now I’m being part of a world competition build.”

Xu, who helps build and program, said he’s learned a lot about himself through the club and realized there’s a strong robotics community. He said he’s excited to represent the school, the state and the country at the world competition and hopes to uphold the winning tradition of St. Bernard, which captured a boys basketball state championship this past winter.

He called robotics “magical.”

“It was pretty exciting because we started with nothing,” Xu said. “So it’s like we walked this long way and we set up a path for our future team members.”

O’Donnell and Xu will be accompanied by freshmen Palmer Noe and Maecus Geren.

Noe has taken on the role as the team’s scout. He watches other teams compete in their opening round match ups and reports his findings back to the team so they know what to be prepared to face, or who they may be paired with.

Geren mostly contributed to the W team for the competition season, but is traveling to Texas as an extra set of hands.

The school was awarded $12,000 in grants from the Montville Education Foundation and Mohegan Sun in 2022 to cover the startup cost of the club.

Jakubielski called finances the biggest challenge in the first year, because they had no idea what to expect from competition fees, let alone travel costs to Texas. She said they’ll be in a better position next year.

Though he has two years left at the school, O’Donnell is hopeful once he graduates others continue the legacy of the club and continue to exceed expectations. Jakubielski said she’s already heard of interested students for the club, some at the middle school level.

“Not only can I keep doing it, but other people can start doing it and hopefully they can love it as much as I love it,” O’Donnell said.

Youth robotics in the region

A group of nine- and 10-year-olds from New London County also will be competing on the robotics world stage.

Southeastern CT Robotics, Inc., a non-profit in New London that aims to give children of all ages an opportunity to explore the STEM field, participated in the FIRST Championship World Festival for FIRST LEGO League Explore in Houston, Texas from April 19 through 22.

They were the only team from the state in their age bracket.

FIRST is a nonprofit from New Hampshire that hopes to inspire children to pursue careers in technology and promotes a wide-range of skill sets.

The team competes in low-stakes competitions twice a year, as they are meant to be introductory and low pressure. Presentations are given at the competitions and judging is based on how well the team followed the official rubric.

The team participates in games and talks with the judges about what they learned about the theme, which was energy this year, and how the team motorized its build.

“We compete in robotics competitions to reinforce the learning that takes place, while at the same time emphasizing our FIRST inspired Core Values of respect, integrity, courtesy, and empathy,” said Fini McGlinchey, founder of Southeastern CT Robotics, Inc.

k.arnold@theday.com