I had Mr. Geppert as my robotics teacher beginning sophomore year. He would give us a brief lecture or demonstration, then turn us loose to work in teams. One day, the eight of us were slacking off. The next morning, he walked in with a McMuffin, coffee, and job applications to McDonald’s.
We took the message to heart, eventually placing high enough in the SeaPerch underwater robotics competition regionals to advance to nationals at UMass Dartmouth. Mr. Geppert drove all of us there in a van. He promised that if we won, he’d take us out to a Hooters “far from anyone I know.”
Unfortunately, we didn’t win, but I did get my first exposure to engineering. Early in the year, he taught us basic skills we would use to build our robot. From there his class embodied the engineering design process. He split us into six teams, each trying to design and build the best robot for the competition. Mr. Geppert provided feedback and guidance along the way. He rarely gave us homework, but as competitions approached, many of us voluntarily stayed after school working on our robots.
My junior year, Mr. Geppert was teaching two robotics classes simultaneously. While he taught the lower-level course, we were building our robot for the MATE underwater robotics competition, a more advanced version of SeaPerch. One day, when we were supposed to be testing our robot in the above-ground pool he had set up beside the school greenhouse, we started goofing off instead—first splashing water, then slap-boxing. Another teacher saw us and wanted to make an official report and prevent us from using the area unsupervised in the future, but Mr. Geppert apologized on our behalf and defused the situation. Something similar happened when, as a prank, I put a graphic image on a teammate’s computer. It made its way to the school’s IT department, where again Mr. Geppert covered for me.
The pool itself had been donated by a local company. Mr. Geppert was a judicious spender of school funds and preferred to fundraise rather than ask the school for money. When we secured a spot at a competition, he had us all put on suits and present our robot to the local Rotary Club to secure a grant for our travel expenses.
At Mr. Geppert’s encouragement, I joined the swim team he coached. It was a walk-on team that included future D1 swimmers alongside a few who could barely swim at the start of the season, with no segregation into varsity/JV. As someone at the lower end of that range, I spent practices constantly pushed by my peers and, with Coach Gepp’s encouragement, gradually moved up to the faster lanes over the course of the season.
My senior year I was working on our robot while Mr. Geppert taught his Marine Science course. During lunch, he would be working out his lineup for swim meets. Against weaker teams, he had everyone swim at least two events while still making sure we would win. He shared Cape’s rivalry with Sussex Academy, perhaps since they had their own pool while Cape practiced at a YMCA 15 minutes away. He had me digitize and run calculations on Cape’s and Sussex Academy’s times to determine the optimal lineup, giving me my first real-world math optimization problem.
Rather than having the swim team vote on captains, he made me, along with the other seniors, captains — something I suspect he did to help us with our college applications. He also wrote my college letter of recommendation.
One struggle Mr. Geppert faced was that he was the sole teacher of both Robotics and Marine Science, two of Cape’s most popular subjects. He wanted to turn Robotics from an elective course into one of Cape’s Career Pathways, allowing students to take it all four years of high school. He said he didn’t want the two programs he had brought to Cape to “die with him.” They didn’t. The year I graduated, Cape hired a dedicated Marine Science teacher, and the following year Robotics became a full Career Pathway under Mr. Geppert.
After high school, I became an engineer. So did every one of my robotics teammates. Mr. Geppert gave me the perfect introduction to engineering. He was an extraordinarily dedicated educator with a Delaware surfer edge. RIP to my most influential teacher.