Charleston area students showcase robotics skills during defense summit

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCBD) – Several local schools showcased their unique STEM capabilities this week through robotics demonstrations at the Eastern Defense Summit in North Charleston.

The summit, one of the largest defense-focused events on the East Coast, was held Wednesday at the Charleston Area Convention Center and brought together more than 1,800 government, military, academia, and industry leaders to “spark ideas, innovation, and solutions” to current or future national defense digital challenges.

The Naval Information Warfare Center (NIWC) Atlantic invited area schools to showcase their robotics projects before industry and government Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) leaders attending the Defense Summit.

Organizers say the interaction serves as a networking and mentoring opportunity for students to receive on-the-spot feedback and career insight.

“Our partnership with the local schools provides financial assistance through the various grant programs, through DOD STEM, but we’re also providing them with subject matter experts to help them with the coding pieces, as well as information for their innovation project, but also with exposing them to different career opportunities,” said Zachary Storti, NIWC Atlantic STEM Robotics Mentor.

Storti said it gives him joy knowing the students learned something, but that they’re also having a great time.

The NIWC Atlantic has a large STEM program throughout the tri-county with a reach of more than 43,000 students each year.

Students from area middle and high schools practiced robotic maneuvers and showed off their skills during the event.

“Most of us are in our design and modeling course where we mostly learn to code,” said Taylor Thompson, an eighth-grade robotics team captain at Dubose Middle School. “We use those skills to help code our robot, where we had to build our robot first because we got a new robot this year, we have to plug it into the computer, and we use block code to code the robot so it’ll do certain actions like move forward to the right and to the left.”