CM’s fastest growing co-curricular is the coalescing of a teaching philosophy, a learning space made for the 21st-century, and a student-driven desire for coding, building and competing that has a robotics team that kicks ro-butt.
It’s the last round of the NE FIRST 2025 Greater Boston District Event at Revere High School, and the CM team has a problem. Their robot, Loch Knights Monster, has a weight differentiation issue and a claw that doesn’t work, and the team has ten minutes to resolve matters before the next round of competition. And there’s another problem. They’re in seventh place…out of 40. They’ve exceeded expectations and that’s a strategic error. They were supposed to be drafted by one of the powerhouse teams to form a duo at this late stage, but their ranking means they’re now the ones who must draft a lower-ranked team and go up against these formidable opponents. Bummer.
CM’s competitive robotics team started in January of 2024, but its genesis was 2016 and the creation of the Innovation Lab. As CM’s Mathematics Chair Pat Murray describes it, “We really didn’t have room for a proper robotics team in the Innovation Lab, which was just a classroom in the old wing of the building with a cool bunch of models and toys that allowed for a different type of learning.” However, it was a new thinking that wasn’t necessarily focused on math, computer science and coding, but was a philosophy unto itself that would become a driving force. “It’s all built on what we talk about wanting our students to develop in the classroom,” adds Murray. “The idea of trying things that sometimes fail, in fact, often fail, and how to tinker with projects and get better. It’s that whole idea of iterative design and being willing to take risks and figure out how to grow from them.” Enter Knight-Based Learning (KBL), a total, comprehensive form of pedagogy tailored to the way boys learn that is preached and practiced in engineering and robotics and is the ethos of CM’s academic experience.
Robotics, touches three important disciplines that are taught daily: computer science; engineering; and design. “We have students who are very good with writing code…others who are good with their hands and good with the building skills necessary to use the 3D printers, laser cutters, and not to mention all the traditional hand tools,” says Murray. “We had to build up that community muscle to where we were strong enough to dive in and really start to compete.” In September of 2020, the Center for Integrated and Applied Learning (CIAL) was opened, a place that would turbo-charge the philosophy of Knight-Based Learning and Mr. Universe that community muscle to bring about a viable robotics team to compete in the nationally recognized FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) robotics program.
In the pit area, the CM team stand around their robot. Captain Chris Helm ’25 is tinkering in consultation with computer science teacher and head coach Tony Kandalaft ’15. Rounding out this group, is the dad of former captain and founder of the program Cole Bulger ’24 who, by the way, is an engineer. While they work, a conversation starts on how they wish the robot could climb the chain at the end of the contest and receive a huge bump in points, but time is short and besides there’s no one who can make that happen in such a short amount of time.. “Overall, we’re caught up,” says Kandalaft on the program’s maturation. “We understand the game, but we’re still showing up with JV-type preparation.” And while they have caught up, the difference between a JV performance versus varsity comes down to experience. “It’s the little mistakes leading up to the first weekend of competition,” says Kandalaft on their first showing. “We didn’t utilize the time we had during the preparation period in the right way.” Chris Helm had an idea that he felt certain would work, but in the end didn’t. That ate up a lot of time, “putting pressure on ourselves,” as Kandalaft recalls. “At that first competition, we completely failed. We had a functioning robot that moved and had a small autonomous phase, which is more than half the robots had. But scoring wise, what we made worked in theory, but in real time didn’t.”
To an outsider, it would seem this season was a bust – the team didn’t progress to state finals as they had done the year before. To Kevin Maguire ’26, a senior member in this year’s campaign, how deep they went isn’t as important as how the team performed and came together. “We got a little greedy in the first competition by wanting to make the robot do everything it could do, instead of hunkering down and focusing on one specific goal, which is what we did for the second competition.” Maguire’s opinion isn’t based on screwdriver technique or the speed at which Loch Knight Monster can travel, but all the intangible skills happening in the classroom and which Murray and the others who worked on the curriculum saw as skills that permeated the everyday. “In designing the curriculum, we talked to a bunch of different teachers at different schools who taught robotics. What we realized was that this directly addressed Knight- Based Learning and the way CM thinks about teaching,” says Murray.
“We can look at specific robotics skills: how to write code, how to measure things, how to set up circuits, how to build…attach motors to moving pieces. But these are not as important as the ability to work in a team, to articulate ideas. If you think your idea works, prove it. If you think that you’ve got it, don’t just write it down, actually measure it and see, does that work? And if it doesn’t work, is it close enough to only need to go back one step and tinker, or is it way off and need a totally different approach,” says Murray. A student might not be a STEM major in college, but in their life, they’ll need problem solving skills and the ability to work with teams…figure out what they know and when they don’t how to fill in the gaps. “All of that, that individual pursuit of a goal,” adds Murray, “rather than simply completing tasks that a teacher sets, we find is really the way education should be.”
The robot is fixed and ready to go, and while it doesn’t have the capability of climbing the chain for extra points, it’s been lights out at the task of putting the balls into the nets. Or to use the language of this year’s aquatic theme, putting the algae into the barge on the “reef” or competition area. But the fix is a compromise to an issue that goes back to the beginning of the season that has returned to bite them. “There’s was a checklist in our heads of what the priorities were,” says Kandalaft referring to the climbing function. “And that was at the top, because that would have put us over the edge for being drafted by other teams. We spent a lot of time leading up to the competition trying to fix that and we just couldn’t, based on how we built the robot.” The robot was too heavy on one side, hence the weight differentiation issue, and so couldn’t balance to climb the chain. “We knew how much time we wasted trying to jerry-rig something that ended-up not working, and so we moved right down the list to the next priority.”
But as with all things CM, the coaches don’t step in, they step-out and allow the experiences of winning and failing to teach. The robotics team are in control. They can either drive their robot off a cliff or across the finish line and what they learn from those outcomes will only make them better. For Helm, the guy with this year’s initial idea that didn’t go as planned, the hands-off approach went a long way to helping improve both him and the team. “Sometimes things will look really nice on paper or 3D modeling software,” says Helm. “And sometimes it just doesn’t work. And the learning experience of being able to overcome those challenges and being able to ideate and figure it out took us to a new level.”
The team makes it through the first of the knockout rounds with their draft pick holding up their end of the bargain. But it’s the next round that has everyone worried. Now, there are sharks in the reef and blood is in the proverbial water. And no matter what happens, there is no doubt that in each of its two years, the program and team have gotten better, more popular, found different ways to help fund themselves, as well as building on that institutional knowledge that works in both directions: the classroom feeding the team and what they are able to do to improve; and the experience of competition helping team members receive better grades and at the same time teaching classmates. If this was knowledge transfer an electric circuit it would be a closed loop, in coding it would be “for-loop” and in design it would be the circular process of testing, feedback, completion…in other words: Knight- Based Learning. But the one thing that doesn’t exist in a loop and can’t be taught is imagination. And it was imagination that in one individual brought about the very founding of this co-curricular. “In a perfect world, 10 years down the line and we’re having our end of the season ceremony, I think the founders award, would be named after Cole [Bulger],” says Kandalaft. “CM gave us the ability to do this, but this whole thing was born from Cole. He came here his freshman year and was from the start begging for a FIRST robotics team and in his senior year, he got it.”
The program will move into its third year bigger than last, with 25 members, and with a group of freshmen ready to step in and step up. To that will be the mentoring of past members like Bulger, Helm, and others. “We still want to have a huge part in the robotics team,” says Helm. “We will still be available for calls and help. Because we know what kind of an undertaking it is to go about building a robot in the eight weeks.”
“You have to fail,” says Kandalaft. “But the most important part is what you do after. That’s why that first weekend and the week that followed was a beautiful snapshot of how the program works, because what happened was, they banded together.” And it will be the same for next year’s team. They will have failures, they will have to go back to the drawing board, make tweaks on the fly, and invest their time. And that’s KBL and that’s robotics. But who knows? Next year might produce some sharks of our own…ingenious ones who go about their business in a way that is anything but robotic.