Daily Archives: November 25, 2012

ISEC co-sponsors this year’s BEST Competition

The International Space Elevator Consortium (ISEC) is co-sponsoring one of the regional BEST competitions this year, the one held in Auburn, Alabama on December 1st and 2nd of this year.

From Wikipedia:

BEST, Boosting Engineering, Science, and Technology, is a national 6-week robotics competition in the United States held each fall, designed to help interest middle school and high school students in possible engineering careers…BEST encourages its teams to follow an engineering process, similar to the engineering process used in many engineering jobs. This gives students a taste of what they may have to do in future engineering jobs. It also hopes to get students excited about the field of engineering and more likely to go into it. Although BEST has not been able to keep up with alumni to see if BEST has had an effect on their career path, similar robotics competitions, like FIRST, show that activities like BEST do have a higher rate of students going into science and engineering related fields.

This year’s competition is entitled Warp XX and consists of designing Tether Climbers.  I’m going to be attending the competition, taking photos, passing out ISEC ‘goodies’ and talking up the idea of a Space Elevator.

It should be a lot of fun and I look forward to attending and blogging this event.