Mentored by BU student engineers, high schoolers learn STEM skills through fun competition
Toiling nearly every day after school for two months, a team of 20 high schoolers from Boston University Academy (BUA) and Boston’s Match Charter High School have been building a robot named Beluga in a workshop at BU’s College of Engineering. The robot, with lifting and grasping mechanisms, looks a bit like a giant Erector set on wheels. With guidance from a group of BU ENG undergraduate mentors, the team has earned high marks in FIRST Robotics scholastic competition this season, winning both an Excellence in Engineering Award and a Gracious Professionalism Award. And now, the team has headed to West Springfield, Mass., for the FIRST New England District Championship tournament.
ENG, through its Technology Inspiration Scholars Program (TISP), sponsors Match students and supports the team (nicknamed the Lobstah Bots) overall by sending their undergrad mentors to help in a hands-off way—troubleshooting and serving as sounding boards while the Lobstah Bots tinker and improve their robotic creation.
“They’re able to do pretty effective mentorship that almost feels invisible,” says BUA student Maxwell Yu, team colead on computer-aided design. “They’re not that much older than us, but they have more technical expertise, and they try to guide us by saying, ‘Have you considered this possibility?’ rather than, ‘You should do this.’”
The goal of both BU’s TISP and the national organization FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) is to expose more young people to STEM fields—and all the possibilities in those fields for difference-making careers—through a fun, exciting extracurricular activity.
“Robotics is the only sport where every kid can go pro,” says Madison McDonald (ENG’26), one of the TISP volunteers.
Read the full story at BU Today
Photo by Jackie Ricciardi