High school students from throughout the state, and beyond, have spent the last three weeks at Bethune-Cookman University learning coding, critical thinking and robotics.
Thanks to a Minority Science Engineering Improvement Program grant from the Florida Department of Education, the Summer Robotics Academy aims to increase minority representation in STEM. Rising pre-college students (seniors and juniors) worked in teams to design, build and program a robot while instructors prepared them for future careers in the science sector.
“The idea is to involve the student in the area of robotics, artificial intelligence, coding, math,” said Juan Calderon, assistant professor of computer science at B-CU. “The principal goal is to try to encourage them to follow careers related with math, science, engineering.”
AI and robotics is the future, he added.
“This is the way we want our students going forward,” Calderon said.
Before student Sean Pierre, of Pompano Beach, attended the academy, he didn’t know how to code. Working with robots is something he had never done before.
And on Tuesday, June 17, students raced robot dogs using coding and artificial intelligence.
“Our team is doing pretty good,” Pierre said. “We’re still working out a little coding, little kinks, so we can get the right speed, the right turns and stuff like that.”
Of the 26 students taking part in the academy this year, seven are girls — five more than last year’s participation. For Farahnaz Golroo, assistant professor of AI and data science, she’s been able to see the girls’ confidence grow as they participate in the program.
“I can see how great they are doing and they’re very motivated to learn more,” Golroo said. ” So I think this program is helping them a lot and I hope next year, and also if we can extend this program to five years, we can actually motivate and encourage more students.”
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