Fun engineering: FIRST Robotics Championship
-- Control Engineering, 4/28/2008
Atlanta, GA – The final day of the 2008 FIRST Robotics Competition (FIRST stands for For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) in Atlanta’s Georgia Dome featured last-minute adjusting, expert coaching, teams celebrating, and teams lamenting, with crowds roaring. Mental agility was on display, as future scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and software programmers competed for honors at a world series of intellect.
Such competitions help create interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and may decrease the anticipated skills gap between number of engineers needed and number expected to retire over the next few years. In related recent news, over the next five years, National Instruments is granting a multimillion dollar in-kind donation to FIRST to provide the CompactRIO system to participating teams.
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| Events like this FIRST Robotics Competition helps excite the next generation of engineers. |
Scott Varvell, team 1764, Liberty Senior High School (MO) took advantage of the learning opportunity, at the Championship and on the Web. "I learned more about Autodesk Inventor in one week using the help tutorials on the Autodesk web site, than I did in a semester of the Introduction to Engineering and Design class at our high school," he said.
The company has provided more than $100 million in professional 3D design software and mentoring resources to help thousands of students get involved in science, technology, engineering and math, in order to gives the next generation of scientists and engineers a head start on their professional careers.
The winners, crowned in San Rafael, CA, last week, included Team 148 RoboWranglers of Greenville High School (TX); Team 217 ThunderChickens of Utica Community Schools from Sterling Heights, MI; and Team 1114 Simbotics of Governor Simcoe Secondary School from St. Catharines in Ontario, Canada, who had formed the winning alliance at the FIRST Robotics Competition Championship at the Georgia Dome in mid-April. All three teams from the winning alliance and all six finalists entered the Autodesk Design Competition or used 3D animation and design software from Autodesk.
Team 234 Cyber Blue of Indianapolis, IN, won the Autodesk Inventor Design Award, honoring excellence in student mechanical design and Team 867 Absolute Value of Pasadena, CA, received the Autodesk Visualization Design Award, which honors superiority in student animation.
The Aiming for Automated Vehicles blog at Control Engineering also addresses robotics.
– Control Engineering News Desk
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