Members of the robotics team and CTE classes showcased their inventions to future students at this year’s Poway Unified School District (PUSD) Career Technical Education (CTE) Expo. The event had a variety of careers, from broadcast journalism to firefighting, presented by students from schools across PUSD, May 17. 

Purvi Jain (9), a student in Honors Principles of Engineering, brought her AI robotic greeting that she built with Shaarika Calidas (9) and Zoey Lestyk (11). The project was a mechanical robot hand, engineered to high-five when the sensor was triggered. 

“My project is a simple high-five mechanism,” Jain said. “It shows a glimpse of the future of AI robots, and how we are going to train them to do a greeting like this. It shows how just by doing a simple handshake or a hand motion, we can see how developed our robots have become.” 

Their project showed attendees what they learned in their CTE class and gave information about these courses. Building and coding the project took the students just over a week to complete. 

In addition to these students, Option 16 members also presented at the expo. 

Citlali Martinez (9) represented Option 16 at the event, encouraging young students to join the club that inspired her to pursue a career in STEM. 

“Because of Option 16, I’m super interested in [STEM],” Martinez said. “I’ve joined other STEM clubs, and I’ve taken CTE courses because of it. I think robotics has definitely given me the platform to figure out if I want to go into a STEM field and explore all the different parts of it while also giving me skills like communication and interdisciplinary collaboration, and also speaking skills.” 

Leading up to the event, Martinez volunteered to help lead the expo.  As a freshman, she said she was nervous but excited for the opportunity. 

“I had to help coordinate getting all the items we would bring there,” she said. “I had to get all the marketing, branding items, and the robot.” 

Martinez’s experience in robotics has helped her bond and build relationships with other students.

“There’s a high sense of community because we do so many projects together, but we’re also just putting a commitment into something that we all want to succeed,” she said. 

According to Martinez, it can be daunting for girls wanting to work in the male-dominated STEM field, so as a part of the robotics club, Martinez wanted to show the young girls at the event that they have the ability to work hard and achieve their goals. 

“Our team’s diversity is almost 50%. So just going out to our community and representing my team, but also showing other girls what they can do is really important,” Martinez said.

The expo not only presented other students with the skills these courses and clubs taught but also to the teachers and district members. The purpose, according to Jain, was to show how valuable the classes were. 

“The school board members will get to know about the skills that we’ve learned,” she said. “They’ll see that if this class is good and it’s teaching the students all the curriculum they need to know, to get to a level of intelligence, then they’ll think, we should recommend this class to other people in the future.”