Highland Middle School holds robotics camp

By Tay­lor Kaser -

It was the bat­tle of the bots at High­land Mid­dle School last Thurs­day. High­land hosted a robot­ics camp last week where sixth and sev­enth graders learned about build­ing robots the first two days. The next two days were spent design­ing and build­ing their own. On the final day, stu­dents com­peted with their robots.

Rich Ramey, Engi­neer­ing Tech­nol­ogy Instruc­tor at Tri Rivers Career Cen­ter led the camp. Ramey said this is the first year that Tri-Rivers and High­land have col­lab­o­rated for this project. He said the kids had a great time and learned a lot about the robots, math, and science.

The com­pe­ti­tion chal­lenge was called “Sack Attack.” Teams earned points by maneu­ver­ing their robots out of their start­ing squares and mov­ing beanie sacks into the squares.

VEX Robot­ics pro­vided the setup mate­ri­als for the camp. The Soci­ety of Man­u­fac­tur­ing Engi­neers and Tech­ni­cians donated money for addi­tional mate­ri­als. Other instruc­tors from Tri-Rivers attended. The goal of the pro­gram is to encour­age stu­dents to enter the engi­neer­ing field.

Three advi­sors, pre­vi­ous stu­dents came to coach the stu­dents. All three advi­sors have com­peted nation­ally in robot­ics pro­grams. Stu­dents have the oppor­tu­nity to con­tinue to com­pete into col­lege. High­land is plan­ning on form­ing a robot­ics after school club for the next school year.

Posted by Randa Wagner on Jun 20 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.