Campus Involvement

Christine Osborne and I collaborated to foster a robotics initiative in the Beaumont area. To be honest, our initial motivation was a personal desire to compete in a robotics competition—a dream I've now realized in my fifth year at Lamar. Our aspirations were previously hampered by a noticeable absence of robotics and related expertise in the area. To bridge this gap, we partnered with Lamar College of Engineering and BISD to introduce a robotics curriculum where none existed before. In recognition of our efforts, Exxon Mobil generously sponsored our self-established organization with a grant of $25,000 to sustain our momentum. Impressively, BISD transitioned from having zero robotics teams last year to boasting an incredible 30 teams at the time of writing.

Here is a YouTube video on Lamar University's official YouTube channel of a fellow ambassador, Kelvin Elgar, and I showcasing Lamar's STEM Building, as Lamar University Ambassadors. The purpose of this video is to show what the potentials of the building holds coming from students that use the building and to potential donors, what Lamar is investing in.

This is whenever we went to volunteer as VEX Robotic Judges for my robotic mentor's competition - two years after my first time judging for them. Our role was to analyze the robotic teams engineering notebook and interview them over the materials in their notebook and their robot. In addition to being a robotic judge, we were scouting and planning out how they ran their robotic competition as we were preparing to host Lamar University's first VEX Robotics competition in the Spring of 2023.

This event was the Presidents Circle. Where the important donors of the university would come for an evening to find out what the university was doing, what they are on track to do, and where they are now. It is single handedly one of the most important events for the universities image. My job at this event was to mingle with the donors and direct them accordingly when the event began.

Here I was directed to mingle and meet with the current president of the university, President Evans at the time, and his guests such as donors, alumni, and other important members of the SETX community at a Lamar Football game.

This is where I had to give a presentation about robots to an entire elementary school assembly. The organized time was for us to come at 9 am, but the teacher that organized it with us did not realize it started at 8 am and ended at 9 am. My team and I came around 8:45 am to be early but not too early and was rushed to the stage to talk on the spot about robots and show what robots looked like answering any questions they had along the way. This school, Regina Howell, is a school we have been working closely with to get their robotics program up and running volunteering countless hours for a year to teach and build the basics of their robotics program to their teachers and their students.

Here I appeared on the local news to publicly talk about our robotic appearance at the Beaumont Children's Museum. I was asked to appear to advertise the upcoming weekend and announce our robotic appearance at the museum. It was around a 3-minute conversation on live television talking about the upcoming event.

A local high school, Silsbee HS, came for a tour at Lamar. What we did, as Robotic Cardinals, is gave them a task to fix or modify the robot they were given to complete a course. They were an excellent excelling group of students, and it was an honor working with them.

Here Robotic Cardinals assisted in hosting a robotics challenge for a daylong event with elementary, middle school, and high school students, called GT-TAME (Golden Triangle - Texas Alliance for Minorities in Engineering). I was responsible in gathering the volunteers for the teaching portion of the challenge. The challenge lasted around 8 hours in total.

These are some of the examples of volunteering at the community garden and for Green Squad. They were typically labor-intensive jobs mostly in the heat of the day. Jobs varied from cleaning out beds, tearing down unwanted trees, or even planting new wanted trees.

Here we advertised robotics for Cardinal BOO where students would come to see the organizations and staff on campus before deciding to attend. The theme was Halloween themed and overall, it was a lot of fun. The other image to the left is the same campus viewing but without the Halloween themed on another day.

This was our first ever Robotic Weekend! For this challenge the robot was tasked to pick up the base and keep it away from other teams for as long as possible. This first Robotic Weekend we reserved for college students only to get an idea of what the robotic building experience is like!

Here is where we volunteered at the Museum of the Gulf Coast for one of their STEAM summer camps. We worked with their campers with giant machine building blocks called Rig-A-Ma-Jigs and taught them the basics of coding using handmade courses designed for robotic mice. 

Here we were invited to attend Exxon Mobiles Family Fun Day, where Exxon workers would bring their families to this event for a ton of fun. The event was held in the Ford Stadium and was MASSIVE. We volunteered for around 8 hours and were treated with nice people and food.

This is another robotics weekend we hosted in collaboration with the Honors college and TALH program. Around 20 high school students attended the event where they would play everyone's favorite robot soccer. The robots took them around 7 hours to build with the event lasting well 8 hours.

Here is where I harvested sweet potatoes we planted in the community garden the previous garden season. The image to the right shows me planting them and the left shows harvesting them some time later.

This was my 2021 peer mentee. One of the initiatives of the Reaud Honors College is to provide incoming freshmen with an upperclassman mentor. This was my second year as a peer mentor, guiding these students on how to survive college as an engineering major. 

Here I volunteered with my alma mater robotics high school as a judge for their annual VEX Robotics Competition. Judging involved reading engineering notebooks to see how well students followed the engineering design process as they built their robots, and then interviewing the teams to see how well they know the mechanisms on their robots. This was one of my first times not being a participate at one of these competitions, but I was happy to be able to judge instead.