BC3 robotic conference draws worldwide crowd
BUTLER TWP— The maze on the table was simple enough: A couple of U-turns from start to finish and not one dead end. But, it took the 20 educators about an hour to navigate to the finish.
They weren't making their way through the maze with a pencil, but rather with programmed robots.
At the Robotics Educators Conference at Butler County Community College last week, about 140 high school and higher education teachers gathered for seminars, speakers and hands-on exercises they can use in their classrooms.
The attendees included people such as Washington, D.C., high school teacher Paula Shelton who would like to create a robotics team at her school and National Talent Training Center director Maan Ashgar of Saudia Arabia who wanted to learn more about robots.
The conference is a partnership between BC3 and Carnegie Mellon University. It's a kick-off to a multiyear partnership that eventually will lead to a robotics certificate and a robotics engineering technology associate degree at BC3, a first for the state community college system.
While some people such as Greg Gassert of Hampton Township, Allegheny County, were at the conference to learn how to bring robots into the classroom, BC3's Steve Catt said the mission of the conference is even more basic.
Catt, executive director of planning and external relations, said the goal is to get more students interested in science and math.
"There's a huge deficit of students going into math and science,"Catt said.
Additionally, experts expect many people in those fields to retire in the next 10 years. So, as a STEMinitiative — science, technology, engineering and math — teachers will focus on ways to make those careers interesting.
Robin Shoop, director of Robotics Academy at the National Robotics Engineering Center, said the partnership is creating benchmarks in engineering for every level of education.
The partnership also includes California (Pa.) University, the Community College of Beaver County, Westmoreland County Community College, the University of Pittsburgh's Research and Development Center, the state Department of Education, and high schools and career centers. It is funded by the Heinz Endowment and the National Science Foundation.
It's also developing four college-in-high-school courses that will result in a certificate.
Graduates with a Robotics Intelligence System Certification would be qualified to be a technician or technologist. And, Shoop said, those are some of the most needed employees.
For example as the robotics engineering center has expanded, the number of scientists and researchers has stayed the same, but the entry-level positions grew, he said.
Those students could then continue on to get an associate degree. Planning for such a degree is in the preliminary stages at BC3, but officials expect to premiere it in two or three years.
But, before students get to the post-secondary level, they need someone to teach them the basics and to inspire them. That's what the three-day conference at BC3 was about.
The attendees, who came from almost all 50 states, England, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, and the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Ontario, started with a trip to the robotics engineering center in Lawrenceville, run by CMU. The educators saw a car that drives itself and robots that will help in the health care industry, Shelton said.
Thursday, after a keynote speaker, the students broke into small training sessions. Shelton, Ashgar and others learned about a certain type of four-wheeled carlike robot from Robotics Academy staff member Jesse Flot.
Named ROBOTIC for the programming CMU developed, the robot's program was written into a computer software by teams. The program was then downloaded to the robot and tested on the maze.
When Deb Christman and her husband from Warren, Ohio, ran a first test, their robot successfully went straight. After a little more instruction from Flot, the couple's robot made a right and a left turn through the maze.
It's a task, Flot said, that isn't normally accomplished in a few hours, but rather in about four days. Still, with what they learned, the Christmans can inspire their own team of robot fanatics.
