Students create hi-tech gadgets at camp

By SCOTT WARTMAN - The Herald-Dispatch

HUNTINGTON -- A throng of high school students intently looked on as their creation, a car made of plastic building blocks adorned on top with a computer board and a colorful array of wires, cautiously followed a curving black line on a piece of poster board.

The students had created these robotic cars as one of several projects for the fourth-annual Exploring Engineering Academy of Excellence at Marshall University this week. The students also created catapults capable of launching a tennis ball up to 100 feet and a carbon dioxide-powered model race car.

Students traveled from all over the state to Marshall University to make these creations. Many of the 34 students at this year’s engineering camp have a penchant for disassembling and reassembling appliances to satisfy their compulsion to understand how gadgets work.

The remote control at the Proctorville home of Cathy Pierce, 16, has been taken apart and put back together many times.

"I have taken apart the remote control many times and it is still not the same," Pierce said. "I like to figure out how things work and make it work on my own."

Some of the students aspire to invent technology and be on the cutting edge of the next wave of products. Working on the robots and gadgets at the engineering camp strengthened his interest in the field, said 15-year-old Stephen Nzishura, of Hurricane.

"I would like to be part of the process of making new things to make the world a better place," Nzishura said.

The activities at the camp are not for novices. The children who are accepted to the engineering academy must have a good academic standing and letters of recommendation from their teachers.

If accepted to the camp, the students will work with state-of-the-art equipment, said Dr. Bill Pierson, coordinator of the pre-engineering program. The computer software and hardware the students used to program their robots were designed by a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"They are pretty complex," Pierson said. "We use them to teach senior level students in college."

The Exploring Engineering Academy of Excellence at Marshall University has served as an example for other similar academic camps around the country, said Dr. Betsy Dulin, dean of the College of Information Technology and Engineering at Marshall. Learning For Life, a non-profit group based in Texas that devotes itself to educational programs for schools, produced a DVD at last year’s camp to use as an example for other universities wanting to start similar career-oriented programs at their school.