BMS Community Outreach
Crystal-Dawn Badger, a Laboratory Researcher in the Nowakowski lab, gives back to the community by mentoring the SAIL High School’s robotics team, the Octo-π-Rates. This year the team has built three robots (two are competitive, one is a performance/service robot) and competed in two regionals—the Bayou Regional in New Orleans and the South Florida Regional in Ft Lauderdale (where they came in second place). They were also awarded one of fifteen $10,000 InvenTeam grants from Lemelson-MIT to focus on inventing a technological solution to a real-world problem. With this grant, they have built an autonomous weeding robot (which the team named “Weed-Rather-Not”) for small scale farms, which will improve their economic competitiveness by eliminating the manual labor used for weeding. Please join us in congratulating Crystal and the Octo-π-Rates on their accomplishments and wish them good luck at their next competition, MIT’s EurekaFest!