An old adage claims that the only stupid question is an unasked one. After a little more than four months in robotics, Meghan and I can definitively tell you that that is as far from the truth as Pluto is from the sun. But have no fear — we’ll ask them all for you.

Our first day in robotics could be referred to as a learning experience, or possibly the beginning of a lame joke. Two literary junior girls walked into a physics classroom, expecting the meager beginnings of a high school math and science education to help us succeed among a group of primarily male veterans. After all, we figured, we were just building a robot. Little kids do it with Legos all the time, right?

Wrong. Immediately, the team set about dissembling last year’s robot, a monstrous conglomeration of metal and wires called the Black Hole. I was eager to help, until the friend responsible for bringing us to Marcos de Niza’s nerdiest club explained that the robot could take your arm off if it got stuck. We had to play with cannibalistic things larger than us?!?! Now, a membership seemed as dangerous as walking into Polyphemus’s cave. (Polyphemus, for those of you who know more science than ancient literature, is the one-eyed monster who tries to eat Odysseus).

Still, I reasoned, if lion tamers could walk into a ring of starved beasts, if firefighters could dive into burning buildings, if millions of clerks could survive Black Friday, then I could master a heap of metal and cables. So, I turned to a rack with enough screwdrivers to make Home Depot jealous, ready to take my part in dismantling the monster. But….they weren’t all screwdrivers!

And here, ladies and gentlemen, is the first of the many stupid questions I promised you. I could recognize one hammer, and the rest were obviously screwdrivers, right? I mean, they had a handle and a stick of metal sticking out of it; what else could they be? Roughly twenty minutes later, I learned two things:first, not every tool is a hammer or a screwdriver(check our glossary for a full list), and second, I will never make it as a mechanic. As a matter of fact, by the end of that first meeting, I didn’t think I would ever make it as an Orbinaut. They were all so smart, and I…well, I was looking forward to a career writing occasional articles about the engineers who created amazing things, not creating them myself.

I was all ready to leave and never return, confident that Robotics wasn’t for me, when Mrs. Stoll explained that we needed web managers and writers. My ears perked up at this — as the online editor of our school newspaper, I was sure that I could handle that. Maybe Meghan and I had found our niche, a place where we could help the team, rather than hinder it. And so, Team 2449 was able to reach out its enticing tendrils and draw in another pair of unsuspecting, but willing, initiates.