Standout Student: Innovation Drives Park Center’s Tyler Haeder
Park Center High School’s robotics team is using old district resources to its advantage.
Curiosity and innovation often starts in the classroom. Take Tanya Drake’s Park Center High School’s engineering class for example. Students are hard at work preparing robots for an unconventional challenge: a race to see which robot moves the slowest.
Drake says engineering is all about innovation.
“One of the really important things in any engineering, career and technical education is this iteration piece of: ‘We build it, we try it; we build it, we try it,” Drake said.
Tyler Haeder checks on his car before starting the slowest car race in his engineering class.
Senior Tyler Haeder is one of Drake’s students and knows a thing or two about being innovative. He helped lead his robotics team to build this year’s robot with sustainable materials.
“All we need to do is something we’ve never done before!” Tyler said, recounting the robotics team’s mantra.
Tyler shows a piece of the robot made with plastic that he just cut using the CNC machine.
For this year’s robotics program, they indeed took on something they’ve never done before: polycarbonate plastic sourced from throughout the district.
“This used to be a sneezeguard for COVID,” Tyler explained. “Then no one needed them, so we got a bunch of free plastic.”
Tyler and his teammates programmed a CNC machine to cut the perfect set of parts for their robot.
Driving Innovation
Drake said this innovation and Tyler’s desire to take it on speaks to his character.
“Tyler really carries with him an aura of wanting to know how everything works, and how everything comes together,” Drake said.
Tyler said he enjoys working with different parts of the team.
“You learn things together, and when you work with other people you often learn more,” he said.
A robotics operation is part programmers, part engineers and part business. Drake said there’s a place for students with any talent. Students start from scratch and receive details about their robot in January. The Park Center team goes to competition in March.
“We have two months to build this massive robot. To design, build, test and rebuild it,” Tyler said.
With limited funding, rebuilding gets expensive. Reusing district materials saves the small team hundreds of dollars.
“It lets our scholars experiment and test things out without burning through really expensive materials,” Drake said.
The competition season is over for Park Center, but this year left the team with plenty to be proud of.
Tyler plans to attend South Dakota School of Mines and Technology next year to study engineering.
Also See: Standout Student: Perpich Arts Student Awarded $20,000 Scholarship
Park Center Senior High School
