Decatur robotics teams bring their work to CAT – Herald & Review

DECATUR Jack Kramer knows he wants to be an engineer when he grows up, though he hasn't settled on an area of specialty yet.

I think it's important for us to encourage people to support FIRST because it provides opportunities for engineering and to have jobs (in the future) and that's what people in this area want. They want jobs, he said.

The Dennis School student is involved in FIRST Lego League, and members of the Decatur teams who advanced to state competition visited Caterpillar Inc. to demonstrate their robots for the employees. CAT engineers advise students in Lego League, although the focus is on students doing all the work themselves.

I show you how to do it, said Joe Kunzeman, one of the engineers who has been involved with Lego League, along with his wife, Sue, for six years. Then you work with me and we do it together. Then you do it while I watch you. Then you do it alone.

Those four steps, he said, ensure that students can do the work themselves and really understand what they're doing.

Younger students build robots out of Legos and program them to do specific tasks on a game board. They can't touch their robots once they begin competition. High school students' robots are much larger and the tasks they're assigned more complicated, but they can use a controller, that is something like you'd use to play a video game, said Clare McCormack, one of the Zip Tie Fighters coached by Kunzeman. She's a student at St. Teresa High School.

They're all sponsored by CAT and we volunteer, said Alston Pike. We're more like coaches. Our role is to kind of guide them along.

Depending on the team, the engineers might meet with the team once or twice a week or more, Pike said.

They're here to demonstrate for the staff what it is they're supporting, said Glenn Shaffer, who's the faculty adviser for the Thomas Jefferson Middle School team. It's a lot of man-hours and it's financial support. It's good for the kids to get out and demonstrate what they do.

Most of the students who participate in robotics will end up becoming engineers, said Thomas Jefferson eighth-grader Dalton Hiser, and visiting CAT is a good way for them to see where they might work someday. Working closely with CAT engineers on their robots gives them an example of someone who's already working in the field, too.

Caterpillar was nice enough to invite us, Dalton said. And they don't really know much about what we really do. This is kind of (students') baby steps into what they're going to do in the real world.