ROBOTICS STUDENTS BUILD THEIR FUTURES.Byline: Mariel Garza Staff Writer VALLEY GLEN - They could have been hanging with friends, cruising the mall or playing video games See video game console. . Instead, 45 San Fernando Valley San Fernando Valley Valley, southern California, U.S. Northwest of central Los Angeles, the valley is bounded by the San Gabriel, Santa Susana, and Santa Monica mountains and the Simi Hills. high school students chose to hit the classroom Saturday to build robots. Not kit robots either - actual working, computer-programmed robots they built from scratch. It was the sixth Saturday in a row that these ninth-, 10th-, and 11th-graders gave up half their weekend to participate in Valley College's first Robotics Academy. An intensive, hand-ons learning experience, the academy is designed to expose the students to something that is less frequently a part of high school curriculum, said Valley College electronics instructor Ron Reis Ron Reis is an American professional wrestler, best known for his appearances with World Championship Wrestling in the late 1990s as The Yeti and Reese. Career Ron Reis was trained by Big John Studd. , who coordinates the program. ``The whole idea is turning the students on,'' Reis said, ``turning them on to technology that they don't normally get in high school. And the hope is that they will continue on.'' The Robotics Academy is the latest of the college's academy programs, which started with a firefighting 1. firefighting - What sysadmins have to do to correct sudden operational problems. An opposite of hacking. "Been hacking your new newsreader?" "No, a power glitch hosed the network and I spent the whole afternoon fighting fires." 2. program that so far has graduated 239 high school students, said John Burke For other persons named John Burke, see John Burke (disambiguation). John Burke (February 25 1859–May 14 1937) was an American lawyer, jurist, and political leader from North Dakota. Burke was born in Keokuk County, Iowa and moved to the Dakota Territory. , director of Valley's School- to-Career Academies. The program is free and funded through grants. Just under half the teens, about 40 percent, are girls, whom coordinators like to encourage in a field that tends to attract more boys. Nancy Camilo, 16, had never built a robot before. She has now built and programmed two. ``It's really interesting,'' the 11th-grader from Van Nuys High School Van Nuys High School (VNHS) established in 1914, is a high school in the Van Nuys area of Los Angeles, California, belonging to the Los Angeles Unified School District: District 2. said about the academy. ``We get to learn a lot of things. We get to do stuff we wouldn't actually be able to do because most of the material is very expensive.'' The students work in teams of three and are overseen by three instructors - Reis; Charlie Wilken, a machine shop and robotics teacher at Van Nuys High; and Marty Mechsner, chief engineer and president of Schober's Machine and Engineering in Alhambra. For seven Saturdays, from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., the students meet on the college campus to learn their craft. More than just building some cool toys, the academy teaches students how to program their robots on computers, work with computer-aided design computer-aided design (CAD) or computer-aided design and drafting (CADD), form of automation that helps designers prepare drawings, specifications, parts lists, and other design-related elements using special graphics- and calculations-intensive software, manufacture parts and install circuitry on their machines. It's not going to turn them into electronic pros, Reis said, but may whet their appetite for learning more about a career in engineering or electronics. The first contraption the students built was a pathfinder robot, a device that is programmed to follow a line drawn on the ground. Saturday, students put the finishing touches finishing touches finish npl the finishing touches → der letzte Schliff finishing touches npl → ultimi ritocchi mpl on their Boe-bots, robots that they can move with a remote control and which they will use for competition. Peter Pogosyan, 14, a ninth-grader at Grant High School, is convinced his team's robot, Valod, is going to win the competition because he knows the programming secret for speed. Just a few weeks before, Peter had never built a robot - though he professed pro·fess v. pro·fessed, pro·fess·ing, pro·fess·es v.tr. 1. To affirm openly; declare or claim: "a physics major an interest in tinkering. ``I always liked to fix my friends' remote-control cars and everything,'' Pogosyan said. This session of the academy ends Dec. 1 with a graduation ceremony and the robot competition A robotic competition is an event where robots have to accomplish a given task. Usually they have to beat other robots in order to become the best one. Most competitions are for schools but as time goes by, several professional competitions are arising. . A new group is scheduled to begin in February. CAPTION(S): photo Photo: Fourteen-year-olds Pammy Pouwongpat, left, Edgar Alarcon and Manisha Bajaj assemble a robot Saturday in a robotics training program at Valley College. The 7-week session ends in a contest. Eric Grigorian/Special to the Daily News |
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