pIEEEdmont potential

A PUBLICATION OF THE PIEDMONT SECTION OF THE IEEE

June, 2002

http://carol.nuvox.net/ieee
South Carolina Council
Today’s Engineer
Adobe Acrobat version

Articles:
Next Meeting : DLNET : IEEE Presidents' Scholarship : South Carolina Council Web Site : Officers

This month we will hear from Donn Griffith from the FIRST team 343. The FIRST Foundation (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1989 to interest and inspire students in mathematics and science. Their mission: FIRST designs accessible, innovative programs to build self-confidence, knowledge and life skills while motivating young people to pursue opportunities in science, technology and engineering. For ten years FIRST has been sponsoring a robotics competition that tasks students from high schools with designing, building, and competing robots. Today, there are more than 600 teams participating nationwide and internationally, in 17 Regional events and a Championship event.

The FIRST robotics challenge this year, "Zone Zeal", is a game of 2 minute matches on a 24’x48’ field broken up into 5 zones. Four robots start on the playing field, paired in alliances of 2 to compete head to head against two robots on the opposite end of the field. Robots race around the field trying to gather balls and place them into goals, place the goals in their scoring zone, and return to their robot to their starting zone before the 2 minutes have elapsed.

Oconee County’s local team, team 343, "Metal in Motion" competed in the eleventh annual FIRST Robotics National Championship held April 25-27, 2002 at Walt Disney World’s Epcot Center, Orlando, Florida. Metal-In-Motion competed as the Curie Division Finalist in one of the four championship divisions at The Championship. Team 343 was selected as one of the three teams in the second-seeded alliance in the Curie Division with Teams 353 (the POBOTS) and 267 (Demolition Squad)!

Don will have a video and the robot from the competition. One parent (and engineer) and his son from the team will also be on hand to talk about their experiences with FIRST.

Learn more about FIRST here: http://www.usfirst.org.

Dinner is free for all IEEE members and students. Guest dinners will be $5. Please RSVP by Tuesday, June 18, 2002 to Sally Surver if you plan to attend and especially if you plan to eat. Sally's email address is ssally@clemson.edu. For directions to the Inn, please call 864-233-8018. I will provide a carpool at the Ramada Inn in Clemson (please contact me (m.stokes@ieee.org) if you want to ride). I plan to leave at or around 6:00pm (I should have a late model green Toyota Sienna).

Contribute to the Digital Library Network for Engineering and Technology. Assist with your colleagues' professional development. Contribute your online educational materials any engineering field and discipline to The Digital Library Network for Engineering and Technology (DLNET), a project funded by NSF and hosted at Virginia Tech. Educational materials (called learning objects) include MS Word files of course modules, PowerPoint presentations, applets, video clips, graphs, and illustrations. IEEE is willing to create the metadata record of your learning objects and submit it to DLNET. Or contribute yourself by following the guidelines at http://www.dlnet.vt.edu. Designed to complement engineering and technology education as well as to facilitate lifelong-learning, these learning objects will be accessible to the public at no cost. Currently only those collections and contents without copyright restrictions will be accepted for hosting at DLNET.

Find out more on how to contribute through IEEE by contacting: Peter Wiesner, Ed.D., IEEE Educational Activities, p.wiesner@ieee.org.

On May 16, 18-year-old James J. Jefferson from Winona, Minnesota USA won the IEEE Presidents' Scholarship presented at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair held this year in Louisville, KY. For his winning project, "Automatic packet reporting system (APRS): building a large-scale geospatial database," he collected and cataloged the entire APRS Internet stream into a relational database. The techniques he designed and built can be used for applications such as rerouting emergency or hazardous materials vehicles due to traffic problems, improving highway design, or reducing the cost of deploying cellular telephone infrastructure.

Full Story: http://www.ieee.org/organizations/eab/newswire84.htm.

The South Carolina Council of the IEEE has been working to create a web site that will support the professional and career needs of electrical engineers based in our state. The new web site contains important IEEE links, real time news feeds and a wealth of other links that will connect the engineer with technology and job related resources. The South Carolina Council of the IEEE invites all electrical engineers in the state to use this important resource and make it their start page each morning. The page can be found at, http://ewh.ieee.org/r3/south_carolina_council/.

Give it a try and let them know what you think.

Officer List:

CHAIRMAN Mark Stokes (864) 647-2065 m.stokes@ieee.org
VICE-CHAIRMAN
SECRETARY/TREASURER Nick Pasquerilla (864) 886-1771 n.pasquerilla@ieee.org
MEMBERSHIP DEVELOPMENT Allen Thomas (864) 228-4322 a.thomas@ieee.org
PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES Nick Pasquerilla (864) (864) 886-1771 n.pasquerilla@ieee.org
STUDENT ACTIVITIES Dr. John Komo (864) 656-5916 john.komo@ces.clemson.edu
EDUCATIONAL ACTIVITIES Lee Stogner (864) 281-8276 l.stogner@ieee.org
NEWSLETTER EDITOR Mark Stokes (864) 647-2065 m.stokes@ieee.org
AWARDS Dr. Randy Collins (864)656-5920 randy.collins@ces.clemson.edu

Use this space to reach over 450 IEEE members in this section!!

The Piedmont section of the IEEE is still offering sections of its newsletter for advertising space. If you are interested in supporting this effort, please contact one of the officers listed above.

-Mark