Our school’s robotics club had one place left for the regional contest, and twenty-two students put their names down. So the first job was to the names into two groups: those who had soldered before, and complete beginners. It took a whole afternoon. Then each had to pass a five-minute test with a screwdriver and a dead battery.
We spent the next two weeks building the robot, mostly after school. On the last evening Mr. Han asked us to how many minutes the battery could drive two motors at full speed. We worked it out twice and got eleven, and we wrote that number on the box in marker. We were still proud of it when, at eleven twenty, the arm of the robot fell off the table and broke into three pieces. For ten minutes it felt like a , and then Mr. Han picked up the pieces and said, “Now we know where the weak joint is.”
We worked until two in the morning. I held the wires steady while Mr. Han soldered them back onto the board. The whole room smelled of hot metal and cold coffee. By breakfast, news of our mended robot had around the school: even the head teacher came to ask whether we were still taking part.
At nine we carried the robot into the hall. As I lifted it onto the table, my fingers knocked the box against a door frame, and one of the wheels came off again. The judge watched the wheel roll across the floor without saying anything. Then she called all forty teams together to one point: a robot may be repaired during a race, but only with the parts it already carries.
At ten the opening began, with all forty teams standing in a line behind their tables. Our robot sat there with a wheel held on by tape, looking, somehow, proud. The head judge read out two announcements. The first one was about lunch. The second was a warning: under no may a team touch another team’s robot, and that rule had already ended more than one season.
We came twelfth out of forty. Nobody remembers the score now. What we remember is Mr. Han at two in the morning, the three pieces of the arm on the table, and the moment the head judge said the word “tape” and laughed. Some lessons arrive as a broken robot.