Wed, 01/26/2011 – 19:53 — Tim Pickens RCSP team leader
We had a great time at our Engineering Meets Education (EME) meeting at the Huntsville Center of Technology (HCT) a couple of weeks ago. We had a great turn-out of engineers, scientists, students, HCT faculty, and other interested folks. We were fortunate to have the culinary department prepare us chili, sandwiches, and a wide assortment of goodies to eat.
I would like to welcome our new partner, Siemens, who has provided 100 seats of Solid Edge to our RCSP team to help us design our Google X PRIZE entry. Bill McClure of Siemens was at the meeting to introduce Siemens’ cool suite of design software. Other representatives from the company were also in attendance.
We spent the evening introducing the teammates, sponsors, prize details, and talked about technical challenges. We also brainstormed about how EME could best serve our team’s overall technical direction, but also provide a great learning and educational experience for our students and other participants.
Mike Evans, an HCT CAD instructor, gave examples of how he had been working a design project for us with students and team member engineers. Mike Sutullo is one of our team engineers who is with Teledyne Brown. Teledyne is leading structures for our team. Mike Sutullo is volunteering his time to walk the students through a design project to help us figure out how to package and erect an antenna system on top of the lander. He described the student, instructor, and mentor engineer relationship, and how a concept became a design, and ultimately a working prototype the students built using their stereo lithography machine.
Mike Graves, RCSP technical lead, described the technical challenges before us, and how the HCT would be instrumental to our building and learning. He brought along Charles Tullock, an engineer from Dynetics, to discuss the many areas we could pursue as a team.
At the end of the evening, we had a healthy group discussion from the audience. We actually had experts at our meeting who worked on the original moon rovers that our astronauts drove in the early 70s.
It was an awesome and productive evening. I want to thank the staff of HCT, the RCSP, and the good folks of North Alabama for supporting us. We have a lot of fun experiences ahead of us.