One of our excellent George Mason High School interns, Camile Borja, asked to lead our new VEX IQ workshops as a continuation of our Spring 2017 creative robotics and IOT/SmartCities program.
Camile is an experienced builder, and she comfortably created the curriculum and environment for visiting 7th graders (and a 4th grader with a few adults) to explore this platform increasingly common in middle schools and high schools. Camile also embraced our emphasis on sensors-driven robotics supporting our IOT/SmartCities Thinkabit Lab initiatives. While driver-controlled robots (remote operated vehicles) are fun and the focus of regional competitions, the programming, computational thinking, logic-driven strategies, and sensor-actuator actions and data collection are arguably the most important outcomes in school-age robotics program in consideration of our future technical workforce.
These creative robotics programs are expected to be featured in all of our 2017 Summer Camps.
Exploring Technical Careers and College, Programming, Engineering Design, Creative Robotics, and all Hands-On STEM Education Strategies
Virginia Tech's Innovation Campus Technical (CTE and STEM) Education and Workforce Development Programs is one of the longest-serving collaborators in the Qualcomm's highly regarded Thinkabit Lab program network, and home to Invention Virginia / Invention DC programs, and the aggregator for the Northern Virginia STEM Learning Ecosystem. The mission of our Thinkabit Lab and all of our STEM programs is to serve Washington, D.C. area students, teachers, administrators, parents, and collaborators in preparing the future technical workforce through career exploration and the hands-on electronic and programming foundations of IOT and Smart Cities, AI and robotics automation, sensors, actuators, data collection and analysis, and entrepreneurship and innovation.
In doing so, we are preparing our future STEM workforce and our increasingly diverse, technology-driven community in lifelong learning for jobs that may not yet exist. Our team will work with like-minded teams, organizations and individuals interested in promoting curiosity, innovation, creativity, and students’ self-actualization and self-determination.