Youngstown has cutting-edge program in robot building

Youngstown has cutting-edge program in robot building

EDITOR:

I agree with Harold Gwin’s Feb. 11 article, “City Revival, a story that must be told.” We should rally around the positives or they’ll eventually disappear.

Youngstown’s Chaney, Choffin, and East Robotics F.I.R.S.T. (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Team is one of over 16,000 North American high school teams. Youngstown’s F.I.R.S.T. Robotic Team is centered in the Project Lead The Way “PLTW” classes, taught by Mark Robinson, Chaney science teacher; and a parallel contingent at the brand new East High School by Tracy Braho. Actual Robot construction takes place after school at Choffin’s Engineering Tech Prep facility, taught by Carrie Pateras, engineer/teacher, with the help of several volunteers.

This fresh collaboration between our totally new or renovated, state-of-the-art high schools, finally positions this awesome nationally acclaimed challenge so that all Youngstown students have equal access. The program has struggled in a closet-sized room, on a shoe-string budget, dependent on Warren’s High School’s facilities via the cooperation of Harding teacher George Lazar, a Chaney graduate. A few administrators, volunteers, and some very dedicated parents have supported students and fought to keep this alive for nearly a decade just under the radar of community visionaries searching for such courageous pioneering efforts.

Youngstown can celebrate this cutting-edge edu-reform experiment structured toward realistic high-tech high-demand careers, and join the success by directing community focus on this and other relative-education efforts. Youngstown will decline, until we rally around renewal and seeing and believing in change for the good of all.

The F.I.R.S.T. League challenge is rigorous and fun for over 42,000 high school students worldwide. District and community support is absolutely necessary and integral to success. F.I.R.S.T.’s mission is to inspire young people to be science and technology leaders, by engaging them in exciting mentor-based programs. NEOREP, North Eastern Ohio Robotics Education Program from YSU’s School of Engineering and other leagues and challenges, near and far, provide exciting educational reform.

RICHARD RUPE

Youngstown

Punish, but within reason

EDITOR:

What a tragedy. An 11-year-old child using a gun and destroying three lives. His life as well as the two he killed.

Punish him? Yes, but not as an adult. He’s a child.

What have adults done to this child to cause him to want to kill? Was there a divorce? Where’s the boy’s mother? Has he felt rejected? Did the child feel he no longer had a place when his father brought in the home another woman and her child?

Have his parents shoved this child aside while they chose to go their selfish ways? Have they taken time to wonder what their son felt, what he needed?

Too many adults are forgetting their children’s needs and are going their own way. Is this what happened here?

Punish this boy, yes. We all have to be punished for our wrongdoing. Then do something to help the child to live with the horrible thing he has done and to make the rest of his life worthwhile.

ROBERTA GILLAM

New Waterford