Editor,

I am the proud parent of an Oak Harbor High School Robotics Team student. I want to raise awareness in the community of a success story developing without much notice or fanfare.

The team has grown from a few curious students to almost 30 young engineers in just five years.

Each year they design and build a task-specific robot from scratch, working seven days a week for two-plus months to compete in a regional robotics competition.

The team competed in Seattle last month and I am thrilled with the experience. The team’s robot didn’t perform as well on the playing field as they would have liked, but some unsolicited comments from a senior official absolutely floored me.

He turned to me after a long day and said that we should be very proud of our team.

He flatly said the Oak Harbor team “was what the first robotics competition was all about and was one of the best at the competition.”

He said he always looked forward to seeing our team and cheers us on because they were one of the few teams where the kids actually do everything — not the parents.

He was very impressed watching the kids make all the engineering decisions and fabricate the changes, taking into account all engineering trade-offs of every decision.

His final comment was that, “their success was not measured on the playing field and our team was a group of winners due to their professional attitude and get-things-done approach.”

He congratulated our school and the community behind them. He said he looks forward to seeing them as future engineers and technical leaders in our community.

Way to go Oak Harbor and OHHS Robotics!

Jeff Margraf
Oak Harbor