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With one championship under their belt thanks to last year’s winning VEX robotics team (pictured above with Derrick Muhammed, CTAE Director and Lori Lauffer, Manufacturing Engineering Instructor) who recently received certificates and championship rings for competing in the state tournament and winning, the newly restructured Career and Technical Agricultural Education (CTAE) department is looking to expand the Savannah-Chatham County Public School System’s pre-existing programs into its own robotics and engineering Mecca to bring home several more championships!
The new state-of-the-art Woodville-Tompkins Career and Technical Institute (formerly Tompkins Middle School, 151 Coach Joe Turner Street) will enable the department to host a variety of robotics/engineering competitions like the third annual Coastal Kids’ Robotics Competition set to take place at the facility on Saturday, December 8, 2007 at 10:00 a.m. The competition will consist of 14 teams total with 7 of those teams; Butler, Islands, 2 teams from May Howard, Ellis Elementary, Coastal and Mercer Middle Schools from the Savannah-Chatham County Public School System.
Three to five hundred elementary and middle school participants and spectators are expected at the family friendly competition in which students work on individual projects and presentations of their work in building and programming robots, presenting energy-related research projects to a panel of experts and purposing solutions to reduce consumption.
SCCPSS’ robotics program under the guidance of the CTAE department began with the first Robotics Challenge about 5 years ago with three teams: Johnson, Groves and Windsor Forest High. Since then, several middle and high schools including Coastal and Mercer Middle Schools and Jenkins and Savannah High Schools are now participating. Each school has developed a strong Lego League team and competes on a regular basis.
SCCPSS elementary schools have joined in on the fun as well. Islands Elementary School under the direction of Kevin Bowden and May Howard Elementary School under the direction of Susan Daly have been working with student teams for more than a year in various competitions to further their development in the programs once they move to the middle and high school levels. Butler Elementary and Charles Ellis Montessori were recently added.
The CTAE engineering programs at the middle and high schools also have students involved in the Technology Student Association like the team at Coastal Middle School in which students participate in a variety of leadership workshops as well as engineering competitions at the state and national level. Their team recently brought home top honors at the fall leadership conference on Jekyll Island.
Coastal Kids’ Robotics is a program of the Savannah campus of Georgia Tech, which recruits and supports teams throughout the year through free workshops and hands-on training. For more information on the competition, contact Julie Sonnenberg-Klein at 912-966-7922 or click here. For more information on the CTAE departments’ robotics and engineering program which provides direction to all career programs including the engineering programs in middle and high schools, contact Woodville-Tompkins Technical and Career Institute at 912-965-6765.
