STEM Academy at Spokane Valley Tech: Lily Chrisman will take her love of programming to EWU and beyond

Some students look back on high school and remember the concerts they performed or the games they won. Lily Chrisman, a senior at STEM Academy at Spokane Valley Tech, will remember, among other things, a 7-foot-tall robot she helped build from scratch.

Chrisman, who became interested in computer programming after wondering how video games were created, is a lead programmer on the school’s inaugural FIRST Robotics team, which created the robot for a competition.

Christman said the robot had to be tall because the competition field featured a 6-foot-tall “coral reef” covered in nine square bits of “algae.” Teams had to program robots to clean off the algae then place PVC pipes onto the reef to help it grow.

“For the programming, making sure the motors went to the correct locations was the hardest challenge of it, since in the code, the motor controls are all based off of rotations, and we had to figure out how that related to real life motion,” she said.

Chrisman is also a member of the Cyber Patriots team, which tackles cyber security competitions. Teams are given virtual machines, or simulations of a real computer system. They then have to lock that system down to make sure it’s secure and that no one can get in through exposed ports on the network.

Chrisman and the team won first place in the Gold division at the state level in a recent competition. Chrisman is also a two-time state champion and national qualifier in SkillsUSA, a nationwide competition where students can compete in fields such as architectural drafting, cosmetology and, Chrisman’s field, computer programming.

Chrisman placed fourth during last year’s National Leadership and Skills Conference in Atlanta, and she’s determined to place first this year.

“It’s one person each, so an individual competition, and they give us prompts for us to make the program on the spot,” she said. “It can be anything. One of them was a grades tracker, where the user could input their grades for each of their classes, and then it would tell them their GPA.”

Chrisman, who also attends Eastern Washington University as a Running Start student and plans to study computer science there after graduating, is patient with those unfamiliar with computer programming and is excited to share what she knows.

Sharing knowledge and learning with others helped her come out of her shell as a freshman.

“Now it’s my senior year, and especially in FIRST Robotics, I really try to teach other people what I know, teach them how to get over hurdles that I know I experienced myself, and share the knowledge,” she said. “It’s fun learning, and I believe that learning is something we all share in, so I want to make sure I’m actually sharing it with people.”

Principal Amanda St. Pierre said Chrisman has always been someone students and staff can turn to. As a senior, Chrisman, along with other students, sat down with St. Pierre and other school administrators to talk about barriers the students had in completing their work and what they’d need to overcome those barriers.

“There’s an investment here for her, and it’s really important,” St. Pierre said. “Part of me feels like that’s not going to change. Lily will go and do big things, and then she will come back just to check in and say ‘How are things? Is there anything I can do to help?’ ”