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Putting Engineering Study to Work

Author:  IIP Digital
Posted: February 2, 2012

When she’s not playing on the school tennis team or reading the latest of the Inheritance Cycle fantasy novels, there’s a good chance you’ll find Natalie Jones building a robot.

A senior at Battlefield High School in Virginia, Jones participates in the school’s ILITE (Inspiring Leaders In Technology and Engineering) Team, a robotics team of 30 students. ILITE participates in the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Competition, which attracts entrants from almost every state in the United States and 12 other countries.

This year’s competition assignment is a robot that will compete against other teams’ robots shooting balls into hoops and dodging obstacles on a playing field. The robotics class draws on what Jones learns in her other classes. “In calculus,” Jones said, “we’ve done a bunch of calculations for the shooter strength. It’s physics as well, knowing how fast we need the motor spinning and what gearing we need.” Her experience in robotics has inspired her to plan for an engineering major in college.

Here, Jesse Knight, an engineer with aerospace company Lockheed Martin who is an adult mentor to the team, shows Jones how to use a lathe to cut a piece of aluminum to fit over the robot’s axle hub.

 

 

09:53, 20/05/2012


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