They’re not just playing games here, Todd Ensign said.
This weekend’s robotics competition at Fairmont State University, he means.
“We have kids here who taking part in every aspect of robotics,” he said, “from construction to coding.”
Ensign is a Fairmont State faculty member and education resource manager at NASA’s Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V) facility, at nearby I-79 Technology Park.
He’s also the chief organizer of said robotics competition, which brought students from elementary age to high school to the campus.
The budding robotics engineers, 140 teams in all, hail from West Virginia and surrounding states, Ensign said.
It’s all part of tournament season for the West Virginia Robotics Alliance, he said. That’s a tech-outreach that fosters that discipline and the study of STEM – science, technology, engineering and math – in schools.
Students who qualify here, Ensign said, have a chance of entering world competition down the road. Three years ago before COVID, a team of Morgantown area middle-schoolers placed well at just such an event in South America.
While all the activities this weekend are geared to the grade levels of the teams, the big game in town is a competition called “Tipping Point,” whereby student-built, small-scale robots run through mazes, retrieve objects and even skirt up and down a teeter-totter.
It’s all about gimbals, gear ratios, torques, coding and the like, Ensign said.
The robots have to literally hold together, he said, which is where the basic structural engineering comes in. Then, they have to be “told” what to do, which is the all-important coding, or internal engineering.
Coding, Ensign said, is one of the key building blocks of the present, with ultra-sophisticated cellphones and electronic workups in cars – systems prone to hiccups and full-on failure, he said.
It will be even more critical to the lives and times of this weekend’s students, he said, as they grow into an adulthood informed by Artificial Intelligence.
This weekend, he said, also has a universal component that has spanned generations: That is, it’s fun.
“Lots of whooping and cheering,” Ensign said.
“It’s like an athletic competition – a ‘sports of the mind.’ And it could lead to lucrative careers.”
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