Momentum - The Magazine for Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering Vol. 4 No. 2 Summer 2019 | Page 25

(Right) Alea
Austin and Connor
Higgs program
their robots; below
Jacob Marshall and
Booker Moldovan
test their robot, and
at bottom, Professor
Alexander Leonessa
provides some
guidance for John
Redd and Aiden Sy.
The second graders
spent three days on
campus and received
a tour of Leonessa's
TREC lab in Good-
win Hall.
Caroll County Public
Schools enlist ME's
help for early robotics
experience
Professor Alexander Leonessa was working with
students much younger than his normal class when
2nd and 3rd graders from Caroll County Public Schools
dropped by Virginia Tech this spring to get some
hands-on learning in an introduction to programming.
According to Heather Ramirez, an elementary ESL
teacher with CCPS, the school wanted to boost students'
interest in robotics and programming.
"We contacted Alexander to see if he would be inter-
ested in hosting an intro to programming to jump start
this process," she said. "After seeing how Lego League
worked this semester, we wanted to start working with
a group of 2nd and 3rd graders on programming, robot
design, and team building skills before the element of
competition, theater, and major research is added in the
4th and 5th grade levels."
Who knows, one day Leonessa might find one of
these students working on his robots in the TREC Lab.