Description

At ROBOTICON Tampa Bay everyone wants to teach and inspire students to be apart of STEM education. While FIRST is active during the school year, students need to find other ways to be involved in STEM activities. The University of South Florida has a summer program called BULLSEYE, it focuses on teaching local middle school students in the Tampa Bay area life and engineering skills.

Our team interviewed Ahmirah, BULLSEYE's program coordinator and learned about the program and her experience while being involved. BULLSEYE is a free 6-week summer camp hosted at USF for local middle school students. It teaches an array of life skills and engineering disciplines. Activities include learning to use a 3D printer, motors, servos and even how to make a functional battle bot. The main focus of the summer camp is to teach practical skills to the next generation of engineers. She also talked about how students who went through the program loved it so much some came back as high school students to help mentor the new minds. BULLSEYE has been around for 5 years and Ahmirah was excited to say that last summer they had their largest camp yet, with over 100 participants.

Ahmirah is a chemical engineer student at the University of South Florida when she was a freshman she knew she wanted to help others. After finding BULLSEYE she explains how she fell in love with what the program did and wanted to help however she could. Even though Ahmirah admits she does not know that much about robotics she still was able to inspire the students and she learned life skills from the children in return. After learning about FIRST Ahmirah was fascinated and said that she now wants to get involved in FIRST.

To learn how you can be involved in BULLSEYE go to their BULLSEYE USF website.

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Participants

Scott Ertz

Host

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

Daniele Mendez

Host

Daniele is a student at Florida Polytechnic University who is studying Computer Science with a concentration in Cyber Security. In High School, she was introduced to the science and technology world through the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), a robotics foundation where students of varying ages can compete through tasks that their robots perform. With help from mentors she met through FIRST, she became interested in programming and developing. Today, Daniele is a special events host for F5 Live: Refreshing Technology and PLuGHiTz Live Special Events and a co-host for both The New Product Launchpad and FIRST Looks.

Marissa Schiereck

Episode Author

Live Discussion

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