Date: Sat, April 17, 11:00am – 4:15pm. Location: 3400 N. Charles St., Baltimore, MD. Level: high school and middle school students.

JHU Robo-Challenge 2010

Team registration is closed, but the public is invited to join in the fun.

The JHU Robo-Challenge is a day long competition for high school and middle school students consisting of five individual robotics challenges, speakers on robotics, tours of the Hopkins campus and the robotics buildings, and lots of prizes.

Some teams will program small robots to move from a starting point to a finish line, passing though a series of “gates.” Others must equip their robots with sensors so the devices can find their way through a mystery maze. Still other teams will be required to locate “tumors” (large dark circles) within an enclosure representing the brain and send out a signal each time a tumor is discovered. Judges will be graduate and undergraduate students from Johns Hopkins’ Whiting School of Engineering.

Last year, twenty-two 3-member teams from Maryland middle and high schools put their high-tech skills to the test in the second Robotic System Challenge. The event will be supervised by Johns Hopkins engineering students who are officers of the Computer-Integrated Surgery Student Research Society. The event is funded by the Johns Hopkins-based National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center for Computer-Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology.

The event is designed to excite pre-college students in educational and career opportunities in engineering and science. This is the only medical robotics outreach competition in the nation for pre-college students. Funding from the Alumni Association enables underprivileged students to participate by loaner robotic kits. In addition to the contests, there will be a plenary lecture on science and engineering in college presented by an instructor at a pre-college engineering summer camp and also a campus tour that includes the new home of the Laboratory for Computational Science and Robotics, a world-class research facility where students will be able to see first-hand groundbreaking robotics research. Admissions materials will also be available for interested students.

For more information, please see the Website

Filed under: Grades 6-8, Grades 9-12, K-12 Outreach Programs

Tags: robotics competitions