20th Annual Olympics & Robotics Competition

The 20th Annual MESA Olympics & Robotics Competition took place on Saturday, April 27, 2013 from 8:15 – 2:00 pm at San Diego City College.

74 MESA students across the MESA programs at San Diego State University, San Diego City College, Southwestern College, Southwest high school, and Imperial high school, participated in the competitions.

The competition segmented in problem-solving sessions and a robotics competition designed to promote teamwork, engineering and problem solving skill development.

The Olympics competition has teams of 4 students solve technical problems in mathematics, chemistry, physics and engineering. The competition is broken down in 3 academic levels:

Level 1 is the beginner level. Students competing at this level are high school seniors or freshmen. The competition worksheet includes problems from Introduction to Chemistry, Algebra, Trigonometry, and Pre-Calculus.
Level 2 is the intermediate level. Students competing at this level are college freshmen and sophomores. The competition worksheet includes problems up through General Chemistry, 1st and 2nd semester Calculus (high school equivalent is A.P. Calculus), and 1st semester Physics (i.e. Mechanics).
Level 3 is the advanced level. Students competing at this level are juniors and seniors. The competition worksheet contains problems up through Calculus 3, Differential Equations, Physics 2 + 3 (i.e. Electromagnetism), Statics, Dynamics, Fluids, Ethics, and other E.I.T. material.

The Robotics competition uses the LEGO Mind storm NXT 2.0 robotics kits for teams of up to 4 students to build robots to complete 2 challenges-an obstacle course, and a head-to-head competition.

Students Joseph Jarvis, Wesley Tran, and Kendrake Tsui from Challenger middle school demonstrated their prosthetic arm that is part of MESA USA’s Prosthetic Arm Challenge, which involves the development of a low-cost prosthetic device to complete certain predefined tasks. A prosthetic arm research presentation was given by Sergio Juarez and Jesus Rodriguez, students from the SDSU Engineering Research Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering.

The San Diego MESA Alliance would like to thank the following individuals for their time and support:

Maria Charles – of Pratt & Whitney, MESA alumna, current Industry Advisory Board Chair
Ryan Charles
Daisy Galeana – of Solar Turbines, MESA alumna, current Industry Advisory Board Vice-Chair
Dennis Gibbs – of Imperial Valley high school
Brianna Lutes – of Infrastructure Engineering Corporation, MESA alumna, Industry Advisory Board member
Alan Philpott – of SPAWAR, Industry Advisory Board member
Frank Rodriguez – of the Imperial Valley MESA Schools Program
Joyce Sullivan – of Southwest high school
Jodi Takei – of Challenger middle school

Robotics competition results:

1st place overall winners (gold medal & 16 GB iPod Nano):

San Diego City College robot – The Kit