Top 50 Engineering Schools Involvement

[TedP]

Oh! And OSU does offer engineering scholarships to high school students who have been involved in FIRST (not just with OSU teams, but with any FIRST team). Information about this scholarship is available on FIRST's website.

Additionally, OSU's first-year engineering honors program:

http://feh.eng.ohio-state.edu/

involves a three quarter sequence that builds up to building small completely autonomous 9" x 9" x 12" robots that complete some task. These students are given $130 in budget and a microcontroller and otherwise build the whole robot from scratch. There is a great deal of engineering that goes on here, involving plenty of report writing and presentation giving. It all ends with a large competition to see whose robot does best. The robots are built in 4 person teams. There are 57 teams this year involved with this program.

There is also an additional honors design project that involves (this year) building a raquet-ball shooter that aims to score through basketball hoops consistently. Last year a frisbee thrower was built. The year before that an air-powered vehicle was built.

Note that these two projects are not simply engineering related. Throughout all three quarters, every week the engineering, physics, and math instructional staff as well as the engineering advisors sit down to discuss the previous week's events and plan for collaboration during the next week. It is an integrated program aimed to optimize the entire first-year engineering experience.

For students who do not take the honors option, a small roller coaster is built. Students have more options for math and physics if they elect to take this option, but thus there is less collaboration between groups.

This first-year program not only provides a great deal of publicity for FIRST and is a great place for recruitment, but most of the FIRST leadership currently aids in the instruction of the first-year engineering program.