The Malvern Prep Robotics Team started in 2003. On April 7 of this year, the Malvern Prep robotics team officially announced on instagram that they qualified for the world championships. On April 15, the team shared the remarkable news to the upper school in the quad, describing the significance of the achievement. Dr. Quinn remarked on the team’s performance,

“What has been consistent from year to year to year is the culture that we try to create within the program which is [that], its student-led, its student-run, its their design, it’s their bot, that has resulted in a lot of pride and ownership in the program.”

The competition process works so that the team always attends two district events. Then, if they perform well there they go to regionals, which is a larger-scale competition. Based on their performance at regionals, the team can qualify for the world championships. At the world championships there are six-hundred teams divided among eight fields which each function as an individual tournament. The teams that win their field go to a final tournament where they compete among eight teams for the world championship. In the past, the Malvern team has only qualified for the regionals event, so this was a massive victory for them. 

The team’s success is largely due to the structure of the robotics program, which focuses on sharing learned knowledge and lending a hand to others who can benefit from the experience. Speaking on the success of the team Dr. Quinn said, 

“The big change this year [is that] we’ve constantly been trying to invest in institutional knowledge, so seniors pass your knowledge down to juniors, juniors pass your knowledge down to sophomores, pass it down to middle school. And we are feeling the payoff of that culture. So this year what happened was that we had that institutional knowledge just result in the team able to accomplish more than they ever have before.”

The importance of team collaboration to the team’s development cannot be understated and played a major role in their achievements this year. Dr. Quinn added, 

“All of the time and effort in here should be focused on supporting itself. So when a student is learning something, or has learned something, one of the very first questions is, [Brady] who are you teaching it to? How are you going to pass that down? How are you going to share that with somebody? That’s the reason it’s successful.”

Orazio Nastase shared his thoughts on the teamwork and partnership, 

“We have a really good leadership team too. I think that’s also part to Dr. Quinn doing a really good job of delegating jobs out and it flows really nicely.” 

Ben Donahue expressed how the collaboration between students impacted him,

“In the environment you are in you’re learning a lot more about engineering about programming anything stem related but at the same time this is as much of a team as our athletics teams are, you have to work together in an incredibly efficient way to get anything done, so it really helps you work as a team, communicate with the other guys and grow as a person too.”

Nevertheless, communication played a major role in the team this year, especially with the team being the largest it has ever been before. Orazio Nastase added,

“Definitely mentally like everyone working more as a team and we got to stay on the same page otherwise stuff is going to get done that doesn’t need to get done, so the big thing was communication.” 

Ben Donahue shared his favorite part of the season, 

“My favorite part of the season was watching all the hard work from not just this year but the last three years pay off and our senior leaders get to go to the world championship and also get to compete at the highest level they could at our regional event.”

John Kelley remarked on the team’s incredible achievements, expressing the importance of the robotics students that attended Malvern in the past, 

“The team’s performance this year has been exceptional…it’s pretty unbelievable, first time in club history, it just feels really good to make an impact and we have a lot of pride in what we did. We are all really proud of how we did this year and obviously we were a big part of it, but it’s important for us to remember that we wouldn’t have gotten here if it weren’t for everyone else that came before us.”