Monthly Archives: March 2022

Collier established the engineering program two years ago when she joined the school. Before that, the school just had a makerspace. Now, there's a one-hour daily robotics class and the robotics club meets for two hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays after school.

SLIDESHOW: Tina Collier, the robotics club teacher and advisor, checks in on seventh grader Zorea Bradshaw and Elizabeth Farias, an eighth grader at East Palo Alto Charter School, during the robotics club meeting at Cesar Chavez Ravenswood Middle School. Photo by Magali Gauthier.

Collier, who became involved in robotics in 2004, also runs Modesto Robotics and Technology, which is aimed at robotics education for kids in the community she lives in.

She enjoys seeing the robotics students have "ah-ha moments."

"They seem to challenge each other frequently to step up," she said. "They drive what (projects) they want to do."

She's also happy the students are learning skills, especially design expertise, they can use in their future professional lives, she said. In addition to metal and plastic robots, students are building chairs out of cardboard, hydraulic devices, laptop cases and other items.

"There's so much industry around that they can become part of," Collier said.

Preparing for the trip to Texas

Elizabeth Farias, an eighth grader at East Palo Alto Charter School, works on her robot during the robotics club meeting at Cesar Chavez Ravenswood Middle School in East Palo Alto on March 22, 2022. Photo by Magali Gauthier.

Colliers bought special boxes for the metal robots, which protect them if they move around in the cargo area of the plane en route to Dallas.

Student-led teams from elementary to the university level will showcase their game strategy, design and teamwork skills at the competition, which takes place from May 3 to 12.

The competition is run by the Robotics Education & Competition (REC) Foundation. The foundation aims to increase student interest and involvement in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) by engaging students in hands-on, affordable, and sustainable robotics engineering programs.

The school is funding the trip to the world championship this year, but they will have to start fundraising in the future, Collier said.

Grant funding

Collier said she applied for grants to make the robotics program possible at the East Palo Alto school.

Last school year, she won a $50,000 state implementation grant that funded equipment like a 3D printer, commercial printer and other robotics equipment.

She also secured a $144,000 grant to build engineering career pathways from the elementary to community college levels in the area. She and her students will introduce district elementary schoolers to robotics.

"The younger they get started in design thinking, the more it helps them in school and life in general," she said. "They learn to problem solve."

For more on the upcoming competition, go here.

Other local schools competing in the championship in the Ravenswood school's division, include Sandpiper Elementary School in Redwood City, according to the VEX Robotics website.

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Ravenswood middle schoolers headed to world robotics championships - The Almanac Online

Members of the Pierson High School robotics team gathered in the schools technology room on Saturday to make final adjustments to their robot in preparation for a FIRST robotics regional competition that was held at Hofstra University in Hempstead earlier this week.

The team expected to know by Wednesday afternoon if it qualified for the national competition, slated for Houston from April 20 to 23.

This is the 27th year of competition for Piersons Team 28, which made its first tentative foray into the world of robotics in 1995 and has become one of the longest competing teams in the FIRST competitions.

In fact, the teams number is indicative of its veteran status. FIRST teams are assigned a permanent number the first time they compete. Teams are now being assigned numbers in the 3,500 range.

Its kind of crazy if you look at videos from even 20 years ago, said Brandon Buscemi, a technology teacher who is in his first year helping advise the robotics club. The way robotics has advanced from then to now is just ridiculous.

Susan McCarthy, a history teacher, is the main advisor. Despite her background in the liberal arts, she said she knew her way around a shop, thanks to her grandfather, a master craftsman who taught her how to use hand tools.

Tom Ruhl, who is also a social studies teacher, admitted Im learning just as much as the students are, as he bravely used a band saw with a special blade to cut a piece of aluminum hardware for the robot.

And the learning goes on until the robot is packed in a shipping container for the competition.

Buscemi said that during a qualifying competition earlier this month in Albany, one of the large balls the robot was supposed to lift bounced off the top of the machine and managed to hit the on/off switch, disabling it for the duration of the round.

The solution? The tiny switch is now protected by a cylindrical piece of plastic cut from a plastic cup.

Tyler Mitchell, a junior who is vice president of the robotics club, is a veteran team member. He is the main driver and does programming for the machine. He said this years competition involves asking robots to shoot or place large balls into a high funnel or a lower one. A second phase of the competition will award points for robots that extend their arms and climb a series of bars, like a child swinging on monkey bars at the playground.

Its not a year-round project, he said. We were given a time frame of six weeks to build the robot. Some of the important lessons are about adaptation and planning ahead.

Because COVID-19 canceled competitions the last two years and some club members drifted away during the pandemic, the team is on the inexperienced side this year. That showed at Albany, Mitchell said, where the robot suffered a number of mechanical problems, but those setbacks also offer learning opportunities, he said. Its about the journey and not the destination, and it gives kids a chance to learn about technology, engineering and definitely teamwork.

Sophomore Jeyda Acar is new to the team this year and is following in the footsteps of her older sister, Esrin, who has since graduated. I would definitely tell other students to join, she said. Its a fun experience to work with your peers and learn to be more creative.

Melissa Mitchell, Tylers mother, is the teams parent mentor. She said the competitions have the same intensity and excitement of a sporting event.

Hofstra gets very competitive, said Buscemi, who was a member of Brentwood High Schools 2013 team. Its intense.

Thats partly because Long Island teams take the competition seriously, but also because the Hofstra competition draws a number of foreign teams.

McCarthy said its not always about competition, but sometimes about cooperation. As an example, she said that a team from Brazil had shipped its robots to Pierson for storage before the match, and Pierson had agreed to bring its competitors robots to Hofstra for the match.

Pierson has been backed by a number of sponsors this year, especially its chief sponsor, Joe Ialacci of Yacht Hampton Boating Club, a day charter business, who stopped by the school on Saturday to wish the team well.

McCarthy also said Pierson had won a $6,000 grant from the Gene Haas Foundation to help with travel expenses, materials and scholarships for college-bound students.

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Pierson Robotics Team Returns To Competition - The Sag Harbor Express - Sag Harbor Express

MORGAN COUNTY A team of homeschooled students have gained global attention for their work in robotics, competing nationally and globally to earn the titles of first in the nation and second overall in the world.

The team, called GEARS 323V, is a branch of Cornerstone Robotics, a private club which advocates for robotics in the homeschool community.

Theteam, currently in itsfifth year as a group, and in just that short time have claimed a number of championship titles, including the 2022 Indiana State Champions and Robot Skills Champions.

"They also won the Design Award, which means the best engineering notebook,"Julie Robbins, the team's coach, said. "They got the Robotics Community Award, which means the team in the state that most helps the robotics community ... they actually went home with a lot."

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The team of five students includes a mix of high schoolers and middle schoolers, allowing for older students to help mentor the younger ones.

The team also holds workshops and mentoring sessions for novice teams throughout the state to help them hone their craft.

"They are number two in the world and number one in the nation for their robot skills," Robbins added. "That's their programming skills and their driver skills in robotics. They've had a good year."

Rankings are for the High School VEX Robotics World Skills Standings, which includes public, private, homeschool, and private clubs.

"It encompasses all different schools," Robbins said. "There are countries from all over the world that participate."

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The U.S. Open Championship in Iowa will take place on March 28-30, with the VEX World Championship in Dallas in May.

Robbins anticipates teams from across the world will be in attendance.

She explained the competitions consisted of two teams against two teams, with the teams being randomly paired throughout the day.

"The people who have the best records... get to choose their partner," Robbins noted. "There's another team in Indiana that we paired with. People may not know it, but Indiana is one of the top robotics states in the world. It's a very, very strong state to compete in."

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Robbins added that the team was currently self-funded, andwere on the hunt for a corporate sponsor.

"They're good at what they do, but they're also just really kind and helpful,"Robbins said. "It's a really good team, they're just great kids."

For more information, visit http://www.cornerstonerobotics.net/323v.html or contact Julie Robbins atjulie.robbins@sbcglobal.net.

Contact Reporter-Times reporter Grace Phillipsat gphillips@reporter-times.com or at 765-346-4815

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Battlebots: Morgan County robotics team ranked second in the world, first in the nation - Reporter-Times

Mohamed Ebeida is looking to inspire the next generation of innovators to change the world, one robotics team at a time.

Ebeida, a research scientist at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, has brought his vision to North Texas. He launched the nonprofit Itkan Institute of Technology in Dallas, aiming to spread access to the STEM topics of science, technology, engineering and math within the Muslim community and beyond.

Since last July, Ebeida has formed four local student-led robotics teams and counting, including the areas first Muslim community robotics team, Marvels of MAS. The team practices at the Islamic Center of MAS-Dallas, home of the Muslim American Societys Dallas chapter.

The competitive goal is to build a robot thats programmed to compete in a sequence of games and complete tasks in under three minutes. The overall mission is much bigger.

The whole point of the Marvels is that you are the superheroes of your community, said Ebeida, who holds a Ph.D. in mechanical and aeronautical engineering. We want our movement to spread and impact as many young people as we can for the greater good of this country.

Most of the kids who joined the teams Ebeida coaches didnt know much about robotics, engineering or programming. In just a few months, thanks to the mentorship of Ebeida and other adult coaches, the students have immersed themselves in robot design, 3-D modeling, programming with artificial intelligence and marketing. They also have tapped into the knowledge of industry professionals to learn and troubleshoot.

Along the way, the team has become a family.

These days, Ebeida said, he nearly has to push kids out the door to go home after sessions that can last up to five hours.

Now they are like a little startup company inside the Islamic Center, Ebeida said. If we can do it here, we can do it in schools and other underserved communities. Our nation really needs efforts like these. Just imagine if every kid learned this at age 12.

The Marvels of MAS team, made up of 25 students from area schools in grades 7 to 12, recently placed fourth in the regional FIRST Tech Challenge, a robotics competition for middle school and high school students.

Its been inspiring to watch, said Lon Cherryholmes, who organizes the North Texas areas FIRST Tech Challenge competitions. He also teaches physics at Dallas George Bannerman Dealey International Academy and coaches three robotics teams.

When I visited these kids in September, they were shy, Cherryholmes said. They arent shy anymore, and they are breaking all the stereotypes. Muslim stereotypes, gender stereotypes it is all broken in this room.

Outreach is a natural extension of Ebeidas efforts and one of the requirements to participate in FIRST Tech Challenge, a global robotics community focused on increasing accessibility for low-income and underrepresented students. The MAS team has shared its STEM-inspired work with other Muslim students through dozens of gatherings at local community centers and schools and virtual presentations with students as far away as Syria.

Our goal is beyond robotics robotics is just a way to get there, said 16-year-old Eisha Alam, a team captain and 10th-grader at Brighter Horizons Academy in Garland. Our goal is to spread the enjoyment and excitement of STEM and modern technology. We want youth who dont have much access to technology to have the potential to grow up and make a real impact.

Holding practices at the mosque is akin to the tradition of mosques also serving as an informal place for education, one of multiple goals Ebeida has for the program. Among them: Promote inclusion and shine a positive light on Islam by hosting events and creating connections between Muslims and non-Muslims.

A lot of people hear inaccurate information about the Muslim community, Ebeida said. When they visit our Islamic centers and see our hospitality and how we care and are supporting the kids and pushing all kids not just ours to collaborate with each other, I think it brings us all together.

For Ebeidas son, 15-year-old Hamza Ebeida, being part of the MAS robotics team has shaped his desire to pursue a career in computer science.

Ive found my passion, said the younger Ebeida, a sophomore at Allen High School, who deftly directs the teams robots to handle the competition tasks.

Parents are a critical cog in Mohamed Ebeidas effort to spread the robotics movement in the Muslim community. The program is free, but kids must apply, and parents are required to attend 40 percent of the sessions.

Amber Sheikhs 14-year-old son, Noah, an eighth-grader at Frisco ISDs Fowler Middle School in Plano, is a member of the Marvels of GEM robotics program. Ebeida, she says, challenges the kids to work together to solve problems, develop technical skills and brainstorm innovative ideas. (GEM stands for Guidance, Education and Mentorship.)

The obvious benefits of the program are scholarships and college acceptances, but what excites me more is seeing the next generation of youth as thinkers, leaders and change-makers, said Sheikh, who also co-founded the recently opened GEM Multicultural Center with her husband, Farouk Sheikh.

Robotics competition is a game with a purpose, and a fun way to teach kids from all backgrounds to learn to work together, said Ebeida, who is fielding requests from all over to expand his program.

His goal is to have robotics teams in mosques all over the country.

To learn more and donate, visit Itkan Institute of Technology at itkantech.org. For more on FIRST Tech Challenge robotics teams and events across Texas, visit firstintexas.org.

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The tech whisperer: Scientist has formed four robotics teams and counting for D-FW youths - The Dallas Morning News

The Beal City First Robotics Competition Robotics Team are heading to a competition at H.H. Dow High School in Midland this weekend.

Were hoping to be able to make it to playoff rounds at the competition, Beal City Middle School and High School robotics coach Kathleen Rau said. We compete again April 8-10, 2022.

The high school First Robotics Competition (FRC) team was started in 2016 and the middle school First Tech Challenge (FTC) team was started in 2018. There are around 15 kids on the FRC team and 12 on the FTC team.

Beal City has Pre K through high school robotics and each team has a season where they design a robot to compete, Rau said.

For competitions, FIRST engineers will design the game which is later released at a kick-off event. The teams will design a robot to play the game in a match play competition.

The Beal City Robotics Team. Photo provided by Middle School and High School coach Kathleen Rau.

The Beal City Robotics Team prepares for competition. Photo provided by Middle School and High School coach Kathleen Rau.

The Beal City Robotics Team prepares for competition. Photo provided by Middle School and High School coach Kathleen Rau.

The team has three sub-teams that consists of the build team, the programming team and the marketing team.

The build team fabricated most of the robot parts this year, thanks to grant funds we received to buy equipment to build the robot, Rau said. The build team is guided by their building mentors Nathan Finnerty, Nick Finnerty, Kenny Myer, and Stacey Fox. The programming team programs the robot in Java under the guidance of their mentor Bill Scott. The marketing team designs or branding logos and have done several things such as bulletin boards, webpage building, 3D printing of awards for competition mostly with me.

Recruiting events for both teams are generally held in the spring.

For more information, visit firstinspires.org or weberjack222.wixsite.com/pegacyborgs.

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Beal City Robotics Team gear up for competition - The Morning Sun

In this past weekends Austin Daily Herald, we hope you had the opportunity to read about Brownsdales young robotics team of Daniel Grush, Abe Phillips and Eric Blust, who are making waves while gearing up for competition on both the national and world stage.

The trio make up an independent team, which means they are not supported by school and despite that have made strides in just three short years that have elevated them from a novice team to a competitive team.

Its the perfect time to point out just how pivotal a robotics curriculum truly is in todays education. Those who compete in robotics competitions are learning skills that will put them in a state of readiness for their days after school.

It teaches them problem solving skills, engineering skills, computer skills and perhaps most importantly working with others to demonstrate the best possible outcome.

This is illustrated in a couple different ways for our Brownsdale trio, who not only have established a team-based mentality among themselves, but with the robotics team from Southland, where they have formed friendships and partnerships.

With a spirit of STEM education, robotics further builds young competitors into better people by starting them on a path of being the technical leaders of tomorrow.

A poignant question remains. Grush, Phillips and Blust have been able to find this level of success in just three years what does the future hold for them?

Its a question that becomes even more poignant when you expand it to include the potential of all kids taking part in robotics and when the question is left that open-ended then in reality the only answer need be: the skys the limit.

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Our Opinion: Robotics a step toward the future - Austin Daily Herald - Austin Herald

New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) Research Institute collaborates with Google Research to identify new cellular characteristics of disease in skin cells from Parkinsons patients.

A study published today (March 25, 2022) in Nature Communications unveils a new platform for discovering cellular signatures of disease that integrates robotic systems for studying patient cells with artificial intelligence methods for image analysis. Using their automated cell culture platform, scientists at the NYSCF Research Institute collaborated with Google Research to successfully identify new cellular hallmarks of Parkinsons disease by creating and profiling over a million images of skin cells from a cohort of 91 patients and healthy controls.

Traditional drug discovery isnt working very well, particularly for complex diseases like Parkinsons, noted NYSCF CEO Susan L. Solomon, JD. The robotic technology NYSCF has built allows us to generate vast amounts of data from large populations of patients, and discover new signatures of disease as an entirely new basis for discovering drugs that actually work.

This is an ideal demonstration of the power of artificial intelligence for disease research, added Marc Berndl, Software Engineer at Google Research. We have had a very productive collaboration with NYSCF, especially because their advanced robotic systems create reproducible data that can yield reliable insights.

The study leveraged NYSCFs vast repository of patient cells and state-of-the-art robotic system The NYSCF Global Stem Cell Array to profile images of millions of cells from 91 Parkinsons patients and healthy controls. Scientists used the Array to isolate and expand skin cells called fibroblasts from skin punch biopsy samples, label different parts of these cells with a technique called Cell Painting, and create thousands of high-content optical microscopy images. The resulting images were fed into an unbiased, artificial intelligencedriven image analysis pipeline, identifying image features specific to patient cells that could be used to distinguish them from healthy controls.

These artificial intelligence methods can determine what patient cells have in common that might not be otherwise observable, said Samuel J. Yang, Research Scientist at Google Research. Whats also important is that the algorithms are unbiased they do not rely on any prior knowledge or preconceptions about Parkinsons disease, so we can discover entirely new signatures of disease.

The need for new signatures of Parkinsons is underscored by the high failure rates of recent clinical trials for drugs discovered based on specific disease targets and pathways believed to be drivers of the disease. The discovery of these novel disease signatures using unbiased methods, especially across patient populations, has value for diagnostics and drug discovery, even revealing new distinctions between patients.

Excitingly, we were able to distinguish between images of patient cells and healthy controls, and between different subtypes of the disease, noted Bjarki Johannesson, PhD, a NYSCF Senior Investigator on the study. We could even predict fairly accurately which donor a sample of cells came from.

The Parkinsons disease signatures identified by the team can now be used as a basis for conducting drug screens on patient cells, to discover which drugs can reverse these features. The study also yields the largest known Cell Painting dataset (48TB) as a community resource, and is available to the research community (https://nyscf.org/nyscf-adpd/).

Notably, the platform is disease-agnostic, only requiring easily accessible skin cells from patients. It can also be applied to other cell types, including derivatives of induced pluripotent stem cells that NYSCF creates to model a variety of diseases. The researchers are thus hopeful that their platform can open new therapeutic avenues for many diseases where traditional drug discovery has been unsuccessful.

This is the first tool to successfully identify disease features with this much precision and sensitivity, said NYSCF Senior Vice President of Discovery and Platform Development Daniel Paull, PhD. Its power for identifying patient subgroups has important implications for precision medicine and drug development across many intractable diseases.

Reference: Integrating deep learning and unbiased automated high-content screening to identify complex disease signatures in human fibroblasts 25 March 2022, Nature Communications.DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-28423-4

About The New York Stem Cell Foundation Research Institute

The New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) Research Institute is an independent non-profit organization accelerating cures and better treatments for patients through stem cell research. The NYSCF global community includes over 200 researchers at leading institutions worldwide, including the NYSCF Druckenmiller Fellows, the NYSCF Robertson Investigators, the NYSCF Robertson Stem Cell Prize Recipients, and NYSCF Research Institute scientists and engineers. The NYSCF Research Institute is an acknowledged world leader in stem cell research and in the development of pioneering stem cell technologies, including the NYSCF Global Stem Cell Array, which is used to create cell lines for laboratories around the globe. NYSCF focuses on translational research in an accelerator model designed to overcome barriers that slow discovery and replace silos with collaboration.

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Hidden Signatures of Parkinsons Disease Uncovered by Artificial Intelligence and Robotics - SciTechDaily