Comments (0) Best Place to See Tech Geeks in Action - 2012
Avnet Tech Games
Pressure has a way of bringing out the best in people. Take Scottsdale Community College engineering students Trung Dinh and Dmitri Mihailov, for instance, whose abilities to work under the gun helped them reign supreme at this year's Avnet Tech Games. The pair had five hours to design, assemble, and program a wheeled robot out of parts harvested from a Lego Mindstorms NXT 2.0 set and race it through a complex obstacle course faster than their opponents. Dinh and Mihailov succeeded, beating out a half-dozen teams from other post-secondary schools and winning $2,000 for school. Teaching college students from tech-minded fields how to thrive under pressure and utilize their skills in real-life situations are the goals of the games, which are thrown annually at the University of Advancing Technology and award scholarship money as prizes. Seven different challenges are staged, including such trying tasks as constructing and tweaking a PC to have the fastest processing speed possible, building a solar-powered water pump from scratch, and assembling a data network using patch cables. (Virtual competitions involving crafting cell phone apps and other digital-oriented contests are held online and are open to students across the country.) Recruiters from Microsoft, Cisco, and other tech firms also attend, which adds to the intense atmosphere, because no one wants to pull an epic fail in front of a future employer. Luckily, no one's ever shorted out any electronics with flop sweat.
