Robots and Race Cars: STEM at the School
The alarm bell about U.S. students’ poor performance in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) has been sounding for a while now. In engineering and technology classes at the School, however, it’s drowned out by the hum of students hard at work.
Take, for example, the Upper School’s Engineering and Technology (Robotics) class, taught by physics teacher Kathy Foy. The efforts of the enrolled upperclassmen, along with five freshmen volunteers, in building and programming a robot paid off handsomely last month, when the team won the Rookie of the Year award at the regional FIRST Robotics Competition. Team Optimus Prin (named in honor of the Tranformers robot, Optimus Prime) was also chosen as one of six teams from that round to advance to the championships later this month.
As with robotics, hands-on experimentation—along with some friendly competition—also gets Middle School students excited about STEM learning, especially in Dan Sheets’s science exploratory RC Cars and Boats. (RC stands for remote controlled.) Using materials from the Ten80 Student Racing Challenge, a NASCAR-sponsored STEM initiative, Sheets and his students work on the cars with much the same goal as a real NASCAR team—to improve performance.
First, they lay out a racetrack in the gym, which involves measurement and calculations and the ability to read a graph grid. Then they work on the cars and control mechanisms, testing alignment, changing gear ratios, checking tires, etc. For each “tune up” and subsequent test drive, they collect data and analyze the impact of that change on performance. Sheets has added sailboats so the students can go even further in their study of “lift,” speed, power, and wind direction, using the swimming pool as their lab.
Of course, these students are gaining a lot more than technical know-how. In STEM education—as in real-life engineering and technology innovation—teamwork and communication are essential. As Foy likes to remind her students, it wasn’t just one engineer’s or one physicist’s efforts that put men on the moon—or guided the endangered Apollo 13 crew back to safety! Rather, teams of hundreds, at times thousands, of scientists, engineers, technicians, and programmers took part, working together (often around the clock), asking questions, testing solutions, discarding them, and trying again.
Freshman Stu really appreciates this aspect of the project. “I mostly worked on programing and electronics, and I controlled the arm during the competition,” he explains, “but I also just helped out here and there. This activity really helped my team-working skills." In fact, enthusiastic teamwork on robots and race cars often turns the hum of hard work into a friendly roar!
To learn more, check our blog for posts about science activities at the School:
- Find out what Lower School science teacher Mary Jane Hoff and her students are up to.
- Get a student’s eye-view of team Optimus Prin’s preparations for their first FIRST Robotics competition.