The San Jose Mercury News
October 5, 2018
By Rachel Basso, Correspondent, Silicon Valley Community News
works on his team’s entry in the Zero Robotics
Competition. His team placed second.
From a young age, most youth have an idea of what they want to be when they grow up. These ideas start with experiences and opportunities they have enjoyed in their young lives, such as TV and movies, or everyday encounters with teachers, police officers or doctors.
By the time young people reach grades 4-6, their career aspirations begin to shift to more tangible, real world opportunities. At this age, their goals directly impact their performance in school and their choices of extracurricular activities, and shape their hobbies and interests. YMCA of Silicon Valley’s Summer Learning Programs are designed to give San Jose youth more opportunities to achieve their goals.
Jordan Nunez, now a sixth-grader at Castillero Middle School in the Almaden Valley, was initially more interested in spending time with his friends and taking a field trip to Great America when he enrolled in the YMCA’s program, which focuses on STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math) education.
Jordan and his peers took lessons with an extra emphasis on coding and robotics in order to compete in the Zero Robotics regional competition, with the potential to move onto nationals. The national prize would be seeing their coding accomplishments used on NASA’s International Space Station.
Jordan hesitated to apply himself to the STEAM lessons at first. “I thought, I don’t know what this is, so I’m not going to like it, and I’m not going to try,” he recalls. “What got me to start getting into [coding] was when [counselors] started talking about robots.”
Jordan was particularly excited by the concept that robots can explore outer space and discover new things. Soon enough, robotics became his favorite part of the day, beating out lunch and sports.
Jordan’s robotics team took second place in the Zero Robotics Competition at the end of the program. Sponsored by the MIT Space Systems Lab, the Innovation Learning Center and Aurora Flight Sciences, the competition left Jordan and many of his friends inspired to keep improving their robotics skills.
“I did the codes, and then there was a robot, a scanner, an analyzer and a guy on point,” Jordan says of the team effort. “I liked writing code and giving directions to the robot. It’s really cool.”
The experience has Jordan considering a career path. Now back in school, he says, “My dream is to be an engineer. I want to focus on computers and robots.”
Read the original story here:
https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/10/05/students-go-the-distance-in-robotics-competition/