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UT Tickle College of Engineering helping high school students prepare for robotics competition

The UT Tickle College of Engineering has held a series of workshops in robotics to help high school students prepare for a prestigious regional and national competition in robotics.

The competition is organized by FIRST – a non-governmental organization devoted to help young people discover their passion for science and engineering. The annual program envisages that students get tasks to build a robot, present it and compete with each other on an international competition according to special rules.

This year’s competition is previewed in the video.

Students Testing RobotsProfessors and students from UT Department for Mechanical, Aerospace and Biomedical Engineering designed workshops for students from four local high schools in order to assist them in the preparation for FIRST competition. This year, students from Farragut High School, Webb School of Knoxville, Knoxville Catholic High School, and Lenoir City High School participated.

“We provided them with robotics kits – similar to those that would be assigned to them for the competition. They had to build a robot from a set of parts and figure out how to operate it and control it. The second thing we did was to give them a series of selected lectures on various topics in robotics,” Dr. William Hamel, professor and department head of Mechanical, Aerospace and Biomedical Engineering explains.

Dr. Hamel says that he was very pleased with the students’ involvement during the preparation period.

Lecture During FIRST Robotics Competition“Everybody was paying attention during the lectures that we had. Participation was consistent each time. We got good feedback from high school mentors. They all feel that the workshops have helped their teams approach their robot projects in a more structured and systematic manner.”

The UT team that is helping high school students consists of two engineering professors – Dr. William Hamel and Dr. Dongjun Lee – and three graduate students from MAB- Andrzej Nycz, Ke Huang and Daye Xu. They held five workshops in the fall 2009 semester and continue to help students after the rules of competition were announced on January 9, 2010.

Robot Built During FIRST Robotics Competition“We help them with some engineering details and fabrication of some complicated parts. We try to make ourselves available for engineering or computer software support,” Dr. Hamel explains.

Students have six weeks to build robots. Dr. Hamel expects that Knox county teams have a good showing at the regional competition in Atlanta.

“”I think our teams will have some very sound robots. This competition is extremely competitive. There are very sophisticated teams around the country particularly in the Atlanta area where Georgia Tech is very supportive.”

Dr. Hamel explains that the competition does not only consist of technical work but also underlines the importance of team work.

“They actually form alliances with teams from other places and they have to cooperate with these teams to achieve competition objectives. They have to understand the rules and capabilities of their peer competitors. They are actually negotiating alliances as they go along.”

Dr. Hamel plans to continue helping high school students in robotics.

“We want them to come to the University during that time and see the campus. Our objective is to have some of these bright students think about engineering careers and to consider attending UT,” Dr. Hamel concludes.