Why Volunteering Matters – Robotics, Cybersecurity, and Building Our Future STEM Professionals!

We can easily donate money or give hardware, but it’s the time that we give that really gets young people going.

About five years ago what started as occasional volunteering at my son’s robotics after-school program has morphed into a full force nonprofit program that exposes middle and high school students to hands-on engineering and technology projects.

As a parent of two children, I have often lent a hand with my children’s after-school activities. I coach my daughter’s softball team and, when I saw there was a need, got involved with my son’s robotics club. The teacher was overwhelmed and had little bandwidth but the students’ interest was strong. I was particularly impressed that these youngsters were asking about concepts that I helped to teach in graduate-level computer science courses! We enrolled the students in a VEX Robotics competition, a competition where student teams are tasked to design and build a robot to complete exercises such as throw balls, do chin-ups, or achieve other engineering challenges. There was a group of students that wanted to take it further. Some wanted to learn about underwater robotics, others were interested in rocketry or zero robotics (robotics related to space), so we thought – what can we do to expand this?

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