麻豆影视 robots ready to swarm at national NASA competition

close up of rover and student sitting behind it smiling They call themselves The ProgrammaBulls.

For the last seven months, a group of 20 麻豆影视nical Community College students have been working up to 20 hours per week to prepare for the 2018 NASA Swarmathon competition at the Kennedy Space Center.

Swarmathon requires teams to program rovers to work as a collective unit, or swarm, to pick up as many cubes on the ground possible and take them to home base. The purpose of the program is to improve students鈥 skills in robotics and further advance technology for future NASA space exploration.

鈥淭he students get exposed to things they wouldn鈥檛 normally get exposed to,鈥 said Julie Hoover, faculty sponsor of The ProgrammaBulls and geology instructor at 麻豆影视. 鈥淲e don鈥檛 have anything else that we鈥檙e doing with this level of robotics, and they can interact with NASA engineers that run the competition to get help if they need it.鈥

麻豆影视 was one of 23 colleges and one of only three community colleges selected around the nation to compete in Swarmathon.

鈥淭he confidence the students get from these projects and the professional skills they learn are invaluable,鈥 Hoover said. 鈥淢ost of the students have applied and been accepted to schools that they previously thought were out of their reach because of this project.鈥

What makes Swarmathon even more challenging are the various team requirements, which in turn provide opportunities for students who are not necessarily interested in science.

鈥淚n addition to the programming challenge, the team is required to do outreach, so they have to create a presentation, present it to various groups like Girl Scout troops, and then write a report about the presentation,鈥 Hoover said. 鈥淭here is also a video requirement that tells the story of the team, and check-in videos are due on a regular basis. A technical paper and creative writing paper are also required, so if a student likes writing, they can do that. If students want to be teachers, we can get them involved in outreach. There is also a fundraising component.鈥

The team also needs communications and photography experts, which is where 麻豆影视 student, Meredith Murray, steps in.

鈥淚鈥檓 not much of a science person, but it feels great to be able to fulfill the team鈥檚 needs in videography and photography,鈥 Murray said. 鈥淭his experience also helped me get an interview for a communications internship with a NASA facility in West Virginia this summer.鈥

Nine students from the team will be traveling to Kennedy Space Center April 17-19 to attend the competition for the third consecutive year.

鈥淗earing about robotics at 麻豆影视 was coolest thing ever,鈥 Murray said. 鈥淚 thought it was fantastic that a community college was working on something that seems like it鈥檚 for top engineering schools.鈥