Robotics Team Mentor Helps South Bay Students Engineer Success

CUPERTINO (KPIX 5) Instead of racing out when the bell rings, many Cupertino High School students are choosing to spend hours after school in the classroom. They're young electrical engineers building robots with mentor and teacher Charles Williams.

"We are really building students," Williams explained. "We are building people."

In addition to teaching advanced physics and math, Williams volunteers between 12 and 30 hours a week with the high school's robotics program.

He listed the benefits for students: "We are giving them opportunities to learn about themselves, opportunities to grow, the importance of learning to work with one another, learning to cooperate with other people, resolving conflict, building confidence."

Student Alex Lo has been building robots with Williams for three years.

"It's not just about building the robot," Lo said. "It's also about how can we make our community better, how can we become better leaders, how can we become better citizens?"

While they're building machines, they are also learning a very human lesson: how to deal with something most students will do anything to avoid -- failure.

"Our students have a tendency to be very successful in life, very successful in most of the things that they do, and they've not had the experience of trying something and not having it work, or having a problem with it," Williams said. "Failure allows these kids to be successful."

Senior Team Captain Peeyusha Boorada said she and her classmates know how to deal with things going awry.

"When we build something and it breaks, we just fix it and try not to do the same thing again," she said simply.

The proof is in the results: many of Williams' students go on to become engineers and physicists for prominent companies.

"That's the first thing they tell me, "What I learned in robotics really helped me in college, kept me focused,'" he reported.

"We can't be afraid to dream big," Lo added. "That's really how he inspires us, how can we push ourselves or make ourselves better or take that next step and really challenge ourselves and makes something bigger."

So for helping kids build confidence and success and a few robots along the way, this week's Jefferson Award in the Bay Area goes to Charles Williams.