In collaboration with our sponsor MITRE, we hosted our inaugural BlueTech Robotics Academy July 24th-28th. The week-long academy was open to high school students in the Boston area and was designed to explore robotics in underwater environments.

Students had the opportunity to integrate various STEM concepts and build an aquatic drone that could operate underwater. Technical content included information on buoyancy, propulsion, acoustics, materials, leaks, system engineering and more. The hands-on portion included soldering lessons, circuits and building an underwater robotic vehicle that was tested in a large water tank and controlled with a handheld gaming device.

Each day featured student lead fireside chats with MITRE employees discussing various career paths and personal stories including where they went to school, what they studied, challenges and triumphs along the way.

The students excelled at building the underwater vehicle kits and had robots in the water by Wednesday afternoon! Some students also had the opportunity to provide presentations to the group, sharing their ideas of what underwater robots can do.

Students often arrived early and stayed late to work on and finish their Robots. When asked why, Shayna, a rising high school Junior, said “Because it’s fun”.

A special thank you to all of the MITRE employees who were on-site daily.

Thanks to all the MITRE employees who contributed to the content, fireside mentor chats and overall success of the program including:

Russ Graves, Jay Lustig, Matt Adams, Casey Corrado, Ken Rolt, Alex Angilella, Justin Tufariello, Michelle Kazes, Nick Rotker, Moise Solomon, Lauren Schambach, Lilia Chan, Doug Robbins

MITRE provided us with the resources to enable us to host this program and were able to highlight opportunities and careers. We look forward to hosting more of these types of events in the future and thank them for bringing such an interesting event to life.