November 1, 2007
Math Fest--This week the Inspire team and director Dr. Doershuk attended the annual Lamar University Math Fest. Math Fest is held every year for local area high school students. We prepared a room for (Lego) NXT robot demonstrations and NXT programming stations. At about 9:15 in the morning approximately 30 students walked into the room to see what we had to show.

After Dr. Doershuk presented the students with and introduction to our team and the field of computer science I introduced the students to the NXT robot. I talked of the functionality of the robot based on its sensors and motors. I explained on how the programming worked also. During my presentation I encouraged the students to program at the workstations after our demos. Jigar helped me demonstrate three demos which are named: runaway, don't_touchme and ghostbuster.

After Jigar and I finished presenting, Iris and Manish presented their demonstrations. Iris presented a choreographed dancing robot programming that she ran on 3 robots. Manish showed a pair of robots that communicated through air cable technology.

After all of the presentations several students sat down and programmed the NXT robots. The students learned very quickly. The students were even adding their own ideas into the programming templates we had set for them before hand. By the time they finished programming the NXT, the students seemed to be quite comfortable with the idea of working with programming and robots. Approximately 20 more students came into the room in that hour.

During my presentation I definitely obtained practice in giving a more effective presentation in front of numerous individuals.

Math Fest 2007 went great and I am sure we were able to provide valuable information to the students that can encourage them to pursue Computer Science.

-Rafael Romero