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May 9, 2008
Robotics Students Meet a Hero of Space
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Dr. Sally Ride talks with members of Dunbar High Schoolęs robotics club during the Textron Technology Forum. Bell Helicopter sponsored the school in a recent competition. |
For the 10 students from Dunbar High School in Forth Worth, Texas, it was an opportunity like no other: Sitting down and talking to Dr. Sally Ride, the first female American astronaut in space.
As members of their high school’s robotics club – sponsored by Bell Helicopter – that recently competed in the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Competition, the students wanted to know all about Ride’s background, her major in college, and what it takes to become a NASA astronaut.
For her part, Ride took a keen interest in the students, walking around the table and introducing herself to each student.
She listened intently to the students about their interest in engineering and how they went about building a robot for a robotics competition. The competition required each team to build a robot so it could lift a ball 33 inches in diameter off a 6½-foot platform and roll it around a 12-foot track.
Bell “adopts” Dunbar High School
The hour-long meeting took place around a table in the atrium of the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport Marriott South in Fort Worth as part of the 10th annual Textron Technology Forum, a three-day networking and knowledge sharing event that brought together engineers from across Textron.
Bell Helicopter “adopted” Dunbar High School in 1982 and Melissa Holland and Hank Williams, the Bell employees who currently serve as the program coordinators, have been working on programs with the students and staff more intensively over the past year.
For its robotics project, Thomas Mast, an engineer in Bell’s propulsion design group, was the robotics club advisor and mentor for the students.
(Bell Helicopter this month received the Golden Achievement Award for Partnership Excellence from the Fort Worth Independent School District for the “time, talent and resources” that its employees have given to support the strategic activities and programs for students and teachers at Dunbar High School.)
Because of Dr. Ride’s passion for promoting math and science among young people, it was a perfect opportunity for her to meet with students who are meeting her challenge of embracing these subjects and encourage them to continue their work.
Experiences to learn from
Asante Allen, a Dunbar junior, who is interested in studying aeronautical engineering in college, was awed. “Very cool. She was very cool,” he said. His questions to Dr. Ride centered around her flight training. “I’d like to be a pilot. I’m not sure about space, but I’d definitely like to be a pilot.”
For Martin Eadie, a junior who is interested in attending the U.S. Naval Academy, it was an experience that he would remember for a long time. “That was amazing,” he said.
Ride told the students that NASA looks for candidates with a variety of skills from different scientific backgrounds, including geology, electrical engineering, the medical field, biology and oceanography. “Your specific background is not as important as having a demonstrated ability to learn things,” she said.
Communication skills are also essential for NASA, she said. “They’re looking for good collaborators. They like people who are involved in sports or in team efforts like the robotics competition that you’re involved in.” After all, relying accurate information between astronauts and mission control is critical.
She told students that she had always been fascinated by science and loved sports when she was a child growing up in southern California. “It was hard to get me indoors,” she said.
Engineering to design a robot
This is the fourth year that Dunbar High School High School has entered the FIRST Robotics Competition, which is part of a national program, but it’s the first year that Bell Helicopter has sponsored Dunbar on this project.
Mast, who is an aerospace engineer by training, met with the students every Wednesday for four hours from January until the competition in March to plan and design the robot from a kit that then had to be individually customized.
His role, he says, was to frame the expectations of what was possible to do over a six-week period and then get them to work as a team. “You break them up into organized groups. You try to get individuals focusing on what they feel their level of expertise is, where their interests lie and then let them go try to solve problems on their own.”
“They use all the principles of engineering. You’ve got all of the systems there just like a helicopter,” he says of the project. “There’s a pneumatic system on board, an electro-mechanical system on board, mechanisms on board, lots of electrical motors. There are controllers and feedback loops.”
Their final product was a scissor lift, which ran with pneumatics, with a pincer on top that could grab the ball off the stand, bring it to the track and let it go. The goal was to push the ball around the track with points gained for each loop around the track. Bonus points were earned when the robot could lift the ball over the stand.
While the students were not among the top finishers, they vowed to be back next year. Mast, too, sounds like a coach who is optimistic about the next season. “This was the first year for a lot of the kids. This was more of a first step. We’ll definitely be much more prepared.”
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