Joseph Dilks received the Robotics Education and Competition Foundation 2017 Teacher of the Year at the VEX Robotics World Championship in Louisville, Ky on April 21.
The opening ceremony at the VEX Robotics World Championship in Louisville, Ky., on April 21 was late getting started, and Joseph Dilks, faculty advisor for the Cherry Hill High School East Robotics Club, was feeling a little anxious.
Cherry Hill East had qualified three teams for the 2017 world championship, tied for the most in school history. Two of the three teams were scheduled to compete at 9:30 a.m., right after the conclusion of the opening ceremony. With the ceremony starting late, Dilks was worried his club might have to leave early to compete.
“At 8:20, it hadn’t started yet,” Dilks said. “Now I’m thinking, this ceremony is supposed to go an hour and a half. We’re going to have to get up and leave in the middle of it. I finally got up and told the teams, if this is still going on at 9:15, the two teams competing have to get up and leave and get ready.”
Dilks didn’t know at the time he was going to be a part of the opening ceremony.
At the opening ceremony, Dilks was honored as the Robotics Education and Competition Foundation 2017 Teacher of the Year. Club officers, seniors Keith Babitz and David Kell, and sophomores Cameron Lund, Dmitri Fifis and Michael Ryan put together an essay nominating Dilks for the award.
The students nominated Dilks in part for growing the robotics club from just two people in 2010 to about 80 people in 2017. However, Dilks refuses to take a lot of the credit for the club’s success.
“It’s all about the kids and how they set this club up,” Dilks said.
The Cherry Hill East Robotics Club was founded during the 2009–10 school year. Founders Aaron Sirken and Brendon Rush set a high standard for the club right away, forming the club’s first robotics team and winning a state championship with their robot that spring. Dilks began working with the club in January 2010 and has been the club’s advisor ever since.
Dilks feels the students are responsible for the club’s success. He credits Sirken and Rush for creating a club built on high expectations, honor and integrity.
“They were the consummate robot builders and they were the consummate leaders,” Dilks said. “To this day, I don’t think there’s been someone to rival Aaron as a robot builder and as a leader.”
After Sirken and Rush graduated, other students continued to build up the club. The club has rapidly expanded since its founding. In 2016–17, about 80 students participated in the club, and 12 robotic teams competed. Three of Cherry Hill East’s 12 teams qualified for this year’s world championships.
Babitz has been a witness to how the club has expanded in his four years at Cherry Hill East.
“When I joined, there were six teams and maybe 40 members in the club tops,” he said. “The room was completely different. We only had room down here for four teams. We had to have people work upstairs.”
Dilks doesn’t take credit for the club’s expansion, instead giving it to the many students who have competed for Cherry Hill East.
“All I had to let the kids know is this club dominates in New Jersey and we have a high expectation,” Dilks said. “We were founded as a club of honor and integrity, and we will remain that way.”
“I didn’t create it,” he added. “I didn’t infuse that stuff. That was the way it was started and I just maintained it.”
The students attribute some of the club’s success to Dilks. In the essay nominating Dilks, the club officers discuss how Dilks goes above and beyond to make the club a successful venture.
“The lessons that Mr. Dilks teaches are reinforced by his work ethic,” the essay reads. “No student has failed to notice that his truck is always in the parking spot closest to school, arriving 90 minutes before class begins, and that it is still there when the students leave. It is just as common to wait for him outside of school hours until he finishes extra help. The passion and dedication he models are sentiments that have been integrated into every club member’s work ethic, allowing our club to maintain a reputation of excellence.”
The club’s other officers also said Dilks is a mentor who has helped them grow both in robotics and life.
“(Dilks) is really doing this because he has a love of robotics and he wants to see us succeed,” Fifis said.
“A lot of teachers will teach robotics, but Mr. Dilks was really a mentor in every sense of the word,” Lund said. “He’s very good at guiding us toward the right direction, but he doesn’t necessarily say this is what we need to do.”
The students received an email just days before the competition saying Dilks was going to receive the award. Dilks didn’t find out about the honor until the ceremony.
“It’s very hard for me to talk about,” Dilks said. “I’m not a very emotional person, but I was overwhelmed by it.”
Dilks admitted he’s not big on trophies, but said the Teacher of the Year honor was meaningful because it showed how much he had touched the club’s students.
Dilks was even happier when he watched Cherry Hill East put up its best showing yet at the 2017 World Championships. All three teams placed in the top-25 of their respective divisions for the first time. The Galactic Gorillas finished in 10th place in their division, Deus Vex Machina finished in 15th place in their division, and the Harambots finished in 21st place. Each division had 94 teams entered.
Dilks said the team’s success has to do with a lot of changes the students made to their robots following the state championships in early March.
“This year’s game is about speed,” Dilks said. “The three teams got together, decided they were going to make changes to their robots, have a design that was similar with their own individual changes and they were going to make them faster by making changes to their drive and their lift. The robot that they built ended up beating some of the top robots in the world.”
The students credited their success in part to increased time working on the robots in the classroom. However, the club’s success at this year’s competition was a surprise even for the participants.
“We did not have someone who went to worlds return to the club,” Babitz said. “It was the first time we didn’t have someone with worlds experience.”
“Mr. Dilks has always said, in New Jersey, we’re a big fish in a little pond,” Fifis said. “But when we go to worlds, we mainly go to have fun. This year was a little bit different, because this year we actually competed.”
The students felt their success at the world championships was the perfect way to represent Cherry Hill East in the same year where their advisor was named the top high school robotics teacher in the world.
“I think the correlation of him winning the award at the same time we competed at a high level shows we couldn’t be doing this without him,” Lund said.
