June 28, 2007 — Twenty St. Croix junior high and high school students showed their skills in robotics and computer programming at UVI’s Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) close-out program Thursday.
The students showed the fruits of the work they’ve done over their summer break to an auditorium packed with parents, teachers and peers. They made miniature robot rovers — modeled after NASA’s Mars rovers — perform a series of tasks, simulating the excavation activities of the real rovers millions of miles away, and showed computer-generated graphics they designed and programmed.
“These students have been living and working and acting like engineers,” UVI’s Velma Tyson said. “They experienced the frustration of engineers as things did not always go as they planned, but, like engineers, they persevered and fixed the problems. In the U.S., we are badly in need of engineers, and there is wealth of opportunity for students like the ones here today.”
The students had two three-hour classes a day, with lunch at the UVI cafeteria. They worked on graphics programming in the morning and robotics in the afternoon.
The students came up in pairs and addressed the audience, explaining each of the dozen or more projects they had completed in 10 days of class.
“In this two weeks, we have simulated actions done on Mars with the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity,” Olga Martinez said at the outset of the first demonstration. The real Mars rovers have to move and maneuver according to programmed instructions sent out from earth. The model rovers also move according to commands carefully articulated in short computer programs. They use a pared-down language called NQC (for “Not Quite C”) in which icons can substitute for words, and vice versa.
“Before the Opportunity and Spirit rovers can do their work, they first have to clear the surface,” Khalid James said, while partner Andre Velez set up the surface-clearing demonstration. The hand-sized rovers performed their tricks on a table top covered with parts and props resembling high-tech Legos. A projected PowerPoint display showed the student-created programming responsible for all the action, allowing the adults to understand what was happening.
The rovers performed an object extraction, grabbing a small plastic cube with a grappling arm; performed a pre-programmed 90-degree turn; and maneuvered an obstacle course by remote control.
Other teams programmed the rovers to play songs, specifying each note by its numerical frequency and playing them in a prearranged sequence.
“Everyone got to program any piece of music they wanted,” Ashlee Douglas said. “It was a lot of trial and error to get the songs right. It was a lot of fun.”
The rovers played "Dilemma" by Kelly Rowland and Nelly, "Unfaithful" by Rihanna, "Amazing Grace," "Blue Danube" and several other well-known songs. The tunes may have lost something being played in computer-generated tonal sequences, but they gave the students something familiar and fun on which to build their programming abilities.
After the rover demonstrations, the students showed a series of moving graphics they created with the NetLOGO graphics-modeling package.
“The students learned parts of two programming languages,” said NetLOGO instructor Michelle Peterson. “With NetLOGO, they learned part of a third.”
Martinez was again one of the first to speak, demonstrating a program that produced a moving Spirograph design.
“I had to use a lot of math to get the job done,” Martinez said. “I’m more of a science person and not really a math person, so it was hard. But I can do the math well now, so it’s not a problem.”
Duvante Vegas and Devon Pelle presented the most elaborate graphics project. Vegas, a charismatic and well-spoken sophomore at St. Joseph, explained it.
“The game we made, 'V.I. Chopper,' was really a collaborative effort of the whole class,” he said. "Even though it was a team-based effort, credit goes to each person. The procedure for the game is over nine pages long. We experimented to create fires, crashes and explosions. The purpose of the game is to get across town through traffic, get onto a boat and get to the KT gas station.”
Pelle demonstrated the game while Vegas talked.
“This was didactic exercise, in the sense we had to rely on previous information and elaborate from there to what we wanted to accomplish,” Vegas said. He invited everyone to play the game in the neighboring computer lab after the program was over.
The STEM summer program was established in 2005 under the St. Croix Foundation Math and Science Scholarship Fund. This year UVI’s Research and Technology Park helped to sponsor the free program, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration donated materials.
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