Andrew Theiss joined staff to teach computer science and lead the robotics program full-time this school year, having started at Harvard-Westlake as the part-time advisor to the US robotics team last school year.

Since earning his undergraduate degree in computer science, Theiss worked at numerous businesses as a web developer, software engineer and administrator. He also served for several years as the team captain of his high school’s robotics team, Woodside High School, which won the David Regional championship when he was a senior.

Although he will now be working at Harvard-Westlake full-time, he will remain committed to the music visualization start-up that he began in 2016 , he said. With this program, he hopes to create an alternative way to produce visuals during live performances and events.

“The production group behind [a live event] has to either pre-record or manually trigger all the lights for the show,” Theiss said. “I’ve been writing a program which will (hopefully) make some more interesting visuals to live music on the fly.”

As the coach for the robotics team, Theiss will encourage his students to build more advanced and competitive robots to qualify for the Worlds robotics competition, he said. Even though his new goals for the team will bring many difficulties, those difficulties are what he’s looking forward to the most.

“A year is never without its road bumps, and working with such talented and perceptive robotics students [last year] made even the more intense moments of competitive robotics moments that I have learned much from,” Theiss said.