One class was all it took for sophomore Rex Hearn to apply his two-year knowledge of computer coding and expand it to greater lengths. Hearn joined the robotics team though he has been coding for two years.
“I have a habit of not believing in my abilities, so a lot of what I’ve taught myself was from spite,” Hearn said.
Hearn began to teach himself how to write code over the summer two years ago.
“My first language was actually Java, but it’s more of an advanced language,” Hearn said. “I was too impatient to work through all the bugs before getting a result. After that was RobotC, C++ and, most recently, Python.”
Hearn said that robotics presented him with the opportunity to use this skill.
“I assumed that I would probably be able to use it later. I just didn’t realize how much,” Hearn said.
He used his previous understanding of coding to become the robotics team’s main programmer.
“I handle all the programs, and I figure out what everything can do,” Hearn said. “A lot of people say that building the robot is the hardest part, but finding the glitches in the code is. You can build the robot, but when it doesn’t work because something is wrong, that’s the big problem.”
The robotics team has two main competitions each year, the B.E.S.T. and Vex competitions. The robotics team scored fifth out of 25 teams.
“Despite losing, it felt great doing that well with what we had,” Hearn said.
Hearn said the hardest code to write was for the B.E.S.T. competition’s robot, Bertha Prime.
“The problem was that B.E.S.T. uses very different hardware than vex, so the coding had to reflect that,” Hearn said. “The biggest problem was getting the servos in the hand to execute the exact right motions to pick up the game pieces.”
After working through the glitches in the code, Hearn said he felt pride when it worked correctly.
“Whenever you finish any robot, you get a wonderful feeling of pride over it,” Hearn said. “It’s an actual moving thing that you helped create. In many ways it’s how I imagine how proud a parent is when their child does well.”
For other students who want to learn how to code, Hearn has one piece of advice.
“You can’t expect a class or Internet tutorial to teach you,” Hearn said. “You have to think of a project, something small, and just start. Coding can’t be taught, it has to be discovered.”
