I knocked off work a little early today to attend the Fermilab Colloquium, which has become a semi-regular wednesday actividy for me. Todays speakers (actually it was two of them giving a joint presentation instead of one today) were two high school science teachers from phoenix. They were there to talk about the way they have helped promote science and technology amongst their students, and some of the reasons that it is so hard to draw students into science and technology in the first place. Anyway, they did this by creating an after-school 'robotics club' that would compete in national robotics competitions. (how I wish that these existed when I was in school). Anyway, most of the talk was more about how their club operates, and the frameworks of the competitions.....But the impressive part was something that I was a little surprised had slipped under my radar. A small group of their kids had been covered by Wired Magazine (which I read regularly, and thus my surprise that I had missed it) because they had entered an underwater-remote-control-vehicle competition at the college level (the teachers made that decision because they reasoned that if they lose to a bunch of college kids, it would be much less disheartening than if they were to lose to a bunch of high school kids). They were going up the likes of MIT and other technical schools in this competition, with their ugly *** robot named stinky....their only goal was to not finish last.
and they won.
the whole.
f'in.
thing.
anyway, check out the article yourself. its a pretty impressive story.
even though its a year-old story, it's one worth reading.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.04/robot.html