Lions, Eagles and robots…oh my! 

2025 marks two decades of robotics at ASL. To celebrate 20 years of collaborative learning, friendly competition, inter-school cooperation and innovation, we take a look back at the evolution of the program, and the indelible impacts it has left on hundreds of robotics alumni.

Eric Fredrickson ’06 was always a fan of LEGO. So when his Grade 8 science teacher, Colin McCarty P ’33 (ASL 2001-present), new to ASL at the time, introduced LEGO Mindstorms robots into the class curriculum, it resonated with Eric; it was the same sort of thing he did at home for fun, anyway.

Three years later, at a high school assembly, he heard an announcement that a parent was offering a small grant for robotics kits for any student interested in starting a club. Eric took up the mantle—and knew right away to ask Colin to serve as faculty sponsor—but the kits, which allowed the club to build sumo bots—small, simple robots that are designed to push one another out of their ring—“didn’t really scratch that itch,” says Eric. “It wasn’t as big as what I wanted to do, and so I just kept pushing until we got something bigger. Building something from scratch was really what I was going for.”

Steve Alaniz P ’06 ’12 was the parent who, along with his wife’s company, had helped secure those initial sumo bot kits for ASL. An electrical engineer, Steve had relocated to London for a few years from Texas, where he had been involved in FIRST robotics as a team mentor. At the time, Colin recalls, “the FIRST program was still very new—Steve had been involved with one of the oldest teams.” 

In the world of FIRST, which now boasts well over 3,000 teams, each school is assigned a number based on when it joined the league. The team Steve had helped mentor back in Texas was “in the 500s,” as Colin remembers. ASL, when it first competed (also in Texas) in 2006, was assigned number 1884.

“So Eric went to Colin, and Colin came and recruited me,” remembers middle school science teacher Chris Goff P ’25 ’29 (ASL 2000-present), who had worked with Colin previously to bring LEGO Mindstorms into Grade 8 science classrooms. “The story we always tell is that we said to Eric, ‘Well, what do we have to do?’, and he said, ‘Oh, nothing—Mr. Alaniz is basically going to take care of it. We just need your names.’”

But then Eric pushed for something bigger and more hands-on, Steve suggested entering a FIRST competition—which would mean building a more complex, from-scratch robot than one of the sumo models—and the ASL robotics program took off in earnest. It was clear from the get-go that all three initial mentors were going to be deeply invested in ASL robotics. 

It was 2005 at ASL, and the School administration was looking for ways to allow students to engage more meaningfully in STEM learning. So the group brought a proposal to then–Head of School Bill Mules (ASL 1998-2007) one summer day, with Chris, Colin and Bill in the ASL boardroom, and Eric video-calling in from a visit with family in southeastern Wisconsin. 

The idea, and the Skype pitch to Bill, was two-fold: Fund a year of robotics, and partner with neighboring state school Quintin Kynaston, or “QK” (now called Harris Academy), to do so. “QK was actually my primary motivation,” reflects Chris, who is credited with having come up with this partnership concept. “At the time, there were lots of really negative interactions between ASL and QK students, and I thought we should have a better relationship with them. And not only that, but they had DT (design and technology) facilities, and students who knew how to use tools.”

The London/Wisconsin video call, a bit ahead of its time technologically, worked: Eric made his pitch, and Bill was in. 

“The misunderstandings, biases and prejudices that each school had about the other were broken down very quickly,” Colin recalls. Each week, ASL students and mentors would head a few hundred meters north on Finchley Road to QK’s DT facilities, partner with their QK teammates and colleagues, and teach themselves for the very first time (with the exception of mentor Steve Alaniz) how to build a robot.

“Oh my goodness, we almost became the ‘Cheese Monkeys,’ or something like that—some weird name… the ‘Monkey Hats’?” says Colin, gesturing to an imaginary whiteboard brainstorm of team names. But it didn’t take long for the team to agree to be “Griffins”: a mythological creature representing both the American eagle (ASL) and the British lion (QK). “We were working together as one. It made so much sense,” Colin reflects. A team member drew the griffin; T-shirts were printed. “That first year, the branding was amazing,” Colin continues. “Those early days were wonderful.”

In the program’s first competition year (2006), the Griffins 1884, comprising about 25 kids, half of whom were from ASL and half from QK, traveled to Houston’s “Lone Star Regional” for the simple reason that Europe lacked an equivalent competition, and Steve Alaniz knew some Texas teams. 

“We ranked ninth at the end of the competition, and we ended up in the elimination round, but the kids were completely psyched,” Colin remembers of that first competition. For a rookie team, the Griffins had done quite well—and they took home a judges’ award, too, as Chris recalls. 

“We didn’t realize that the captains could choose each other in the alliance selection,” Chris says, referring to FIRST competitions’ complicated system of ally/opponent team divisions. “Eric moved up and became an alliance captain, and he had to choose teams. We didn’t do any scouting; we didn’t know anything. Eric just had to remember teams from having driven [robots] with them over a day and a half of qualification matches, and miraculously, he ended up picking two pretty good teams.”

Spring of 2007 marked the Griffins’ second FIRST competition—and their first in New York, arguably closer to “regional” for a London-based team than Houston, if not by much—but also the end of Bill Mules’s and Steve Alaniz’s respective ASL tenures.

“Chris and I kept going, but we weren’t sure if we had funding anymore,” remarks Colin, who led the program at the time. As soon as new Head of School Coreen Hester P ’02 ’04 (ASL 1995-97, 2007-17, 2022-23) arrived on campus, Colin and Chris arranged a meeting to ask if robotics could continue. “She said, ‘Of course! It’s already funded,’” Colin remembers. And so the program plugged happily along into its third school year.

“The build season is only six weeks,” Billy Kennedy ’13, robotics alum–turned–astronautical engineer, fondly recalls. “It was a really exciting time of the school year. You bonded a lot with those other students—some of the people I got to know from QK, I’m still in touch with today. And it definitely played a role in me wanting to study engineering in college.”

Robotics represented Billy’s first foray into teamwork that required real trust in other people’s specialties. “Some students focused on the ‘build’ aspect”—Billy included—while others, he remembers, chose to go deep on the programming, or the electronics. “It was my first experience of work that involved a complex division of labor”—something that he now deals with on a larger scale daily, as a mission integration engineer for SpaceX’s Starship.

Billy estimates that a handful of ASL robotics alumni he knows now work in software engineering, while others, he says, have gotten their PhDs and pursued academic careers. “And there’s another robotics alum just down the road who works in aerospace at Northrop Grumman in Los Angeles,” says Billy, who’s also based in Southern California.

Likewise, both Taegen Kopfler ’17 and Jordi Albanell ’17 in large part credit their time on ASL robotics with setting them on their career paths since.

Taegen’s two years of robotics helped to familiarize her with new technology and hardware, and offered formative collaborative learning opportunities. Her experiences led her to enroll in pre-engineering courses at Middlebury College, where she majored in physics. Today, she works in the renewable energy sector. “I would not be where I am today without the support and growth of the ASL robotics team,” Taegen says. 

For Jordi, who moved to London from Spain in Grade 5, the decision to join FIRST LEGO League (FLL), the middle school answer to FIRST robotics, came from a desire to make new friends in Grade 6. “Little did I know, I was about to embark on an amazing 14 years of my life,” Jordi writes from Singapore, where he works now as a design consultant. Jordi spent three years participating in FLL, and all of high school doing FIRST robotics, which he describes collectively as the highlight of his ASL career. 

As a robotics team member, Jordi reflects, “I had the chance to travel to New York and Shenzhen, discovering new places, meeting new people, and slowly growing a deep passion for engineering.” He went on to earn his master’s degree in engineering design at Imperial College London, returning to One Waverley Place as a mentor regularly over the six years between his ASL graduation and his recent move to Singapore.

Muktar Ali (ASL 2012-18, 2022-present) joined the Griffins as a QK student “and then never left,” says Colin. “He went off to university, but then came back as a volunteer because his brother, Ekram, was still a student at QK and joined the team.” Muktar continued to mentor even after the partnership between the two schools came to an end—a result of irreconcilable scheduling conflicts between FIRST competition season and QK’s rigorous sixth-form exam period. As Colin remembers it, “Muktar just started assuming more and more responsibilities” of team leadership. 

“Muktar is really the star of the show,” says Chris. In 2018, Muktar left ASL, where he had been leading robotics (in a part-time capacity), to start FIRST UK. Four years later, when a full-time robotics program director role opened up at ASL, Chris remembers imploring Devan Ganeshananthan P ’27 (ASL 2018-23), the high school principal at the time, “‘If Muktar is available, you have to hire him.’ It’s like if Phil Jackson is available to coach your basketball team: You have to hire him.” Muktar became ASL’s official, full-time robotics program director in 2022.

The team had seen lean years and years of plenty when it came to space and resources following the dissolution of the QK partnership, and the DT facilities that had come with it. A notable highlight, Colin remembers, was 2015-16, in the middle of the New Frontiers capital campaign, when fortuitous construction schedules meant that robotics briefly enjoyed exclusive use of the entire wing of the building that now houses both the MILL (ASL’s K-12 STEAM maker space) and the renovated middle school science labs. By 2022, the team had been settled in the MILL for nearly six years.

Earlier this month, as the Griffins marked their 20th anniversary with a FIRST competition in Suffern, New York, Muktar and a host of other mentors and supporters helped lead the team to a sustainability award victory. The award, in the words of current team member Oskar Doepke ’25, “is about both environmental sustainability as well as making sure your team is sustainable from a people perspective.”

While the Griffins didn’t win an award for their robot this year, ASL robotics has always been about more than just the competition and its technical component—the program’s commitment to its mission and community has been integral from the beginning.

“The ways to qualify to the world championship are either through the robot game or through your outreach,” explains program alum and mentor Mackensie Kim ’21. “Since we’re in the UK, and we are one of only two FIRST teams in the country, we have a lot of space and flexibility to do outreach. We go into lots of different schools outside of ASL and mentor in robotics. We’ve hosted three events this year that bring in external competitions, and we donate a lot of money to different teams in the UK to try and help them level up their experience.” 

Students help raise these funds from corporate sponsors. “ASL provides the money we need for the robot side, so 100% of our fundraising goes to the mission side,” Mackensie explains. 

She didn’t actually intend to mentor past her ASL graduation, especially in her first year out. Mackensie went on to study math at Oxford, where she will graduate later this spring, while her younger sister, Carrie Kim ’22, captained the Griffins as a Grade 12 student. “I didn’t want to step on any toes,” says Mackensie, but a friend of hers was planning to return as a mentor in the 2021-22 school year, so she went along too.

“Most of the time I was on the team, I was more of a project manager than anything else—or a design lead,” says Mackensie. “I would help make sure that we had the designs; that everything was thought about; that we had everything ready. Then other people would build it, and we would come back together, test everything, and go back through the engineering design process. It was also something I really enjoyed: making sure that from a high level, everything is going in the direction that it should be, and we’re not missing any key information.” When Mackensie returned to ASL as a robotics mentor, she primarily helped out at competitions.

Thinking back to that first, miraculous competition in Houston in 2006, when team captain Eric took to the alliance captain position with nothing more than a day and a half of qualification match memories and a dream, Chris remarks that now, scouting at competitions—Mackensie’s bread and butter—is key to the Griffins’ strategy and success. 

“It’s a super data-driven operation,” Chris says. “Mackensie is an Oxford mathematician, and she has brought in these super-analytics—a Moneyball kind of thing—and taken our scouting to the next level.” Griffins members and mentors have eyes on every match during their competition, and all the information they collect is entered into a custom, team-built open-source system: a project Mackensie capably led. “We watch every match; every team; we know everything they did, and we know their percentages. We come up with strategy; how we want to play. That scouting data helps us choose the right partners,” Chris explains.

To celebrate 20 years of ASL robotics, the team collected thank-yous and testimonials from grateful alumni now spread across the world, each with their own stories of how high school robotics helped shape their lives since. 

Eric Fredrickson, whose memories of the program span its full 20 years, filmed his own video contribution at his home in Neenah, Wisconsin, where he’s lived for over a decade—not far from where he made that first, fateful video call pitch to Bill Mules as a high school student—and where he currently works as a supplier quality engineer. 

Eric remembers working with his Griffins teammates in the team’s first two years, as they taught themselves to build a robot: “It was a lot of fun being there and figuring things out—not just about the robot, but team dynamics, too. ‘How do we figure out how to get to the next step? How do we figure out the skills we need to design; to build; to attach these pieces so they move the way we want; to program the robot to do what we want?’ All of those steps, and not knowing how to do them—but figuring it out. That was something I took with me as well.”

In his current role, Eric doesn’t design products; instead, he looks at broader supply-chain processes and tries to identify problems, and their roots and solutions alike.

Toward the end of his heartfelt clip commemorating robotics’ 20th anniversary at ASL, Eric addresses mentors past and present: “If doing this for 20 years ever makes you feel old,” Eric says, “just remember that your first students are now middle-aged and have school-aged children of their own. But in those 20 years, there are hundreds of students whom you have gotten interested in engineering, and shown what they can create with their own imagination and hard work.”

Eric and his wife have two children, the elder of whom is five—just becoming school-aged, and just starting to get into LEGO himself.

 

 

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Help the Griffins 1884 celebrate 20 years of robotics excellence!
As the program wraps up an incredible 20th anniversary year, thek Griffins are bringing the community together to celebrate! Whether you were part of the team, a parent of a robotics student, cheered from the sidelines, or just want to reconnect with ASL and the Griffins, the 2024-25 team would love to see you at their 20th anniversary party here at ASL on 20 May. Come share memories, catch up with old friends, and toast to the future of ASL robotics. RSVP.