Kristen Garcia: IEEE Student Featured on Murray State's Website

Kristin Garcia is an Engineering Physics major, Mathematics minor, from Milan, Tennessee. One of Kristin's major accomplishments was helping to reform Murray State's IEEE student chapter in 2011. Ms. Garcia is a junior at Murray State.

Murray State IEEE Chapter Heads to IEEE SoutheastCon 2014

March 14th - March 15th, 2014 brings the annual SoutheastCon. Held at the University of Kentucky, the IEEE SoutheastCon brings together IEEE teams from around the Commonwealth to participate in a hardware-based competition, i.e. build a robot to accomplish some goal.

This year's Student Hardware Competition brings a challenge very appropriate for both Kentucky and the time of year. The 2014 challenge involves designing a robot to shoot a projectile from various distances to emulate the playing and shooting dynamics of basketball.

What better challenge than one aligned with basketball, SEC tournament play, and NCAA March Madness?

The objective will to build a a robot that operates on a simulated basketball court. The robot must follow three lines with randomly positioned shooting blocks and then fire a dart while positioned on top of the shooting block. Winners will be decided by number of points earned by completing goals and completion time so the highest scoring robots will be both fast and precise.

Friday and Saturday, teams will assemble and test their robots. Saturday afternoon, teams will compete, culminating in the awards ceremony Saturday night. Throughout each day, other activities are available, ranging from leadership training workshops, workshops on renewable energy, and RaspberryPi tutorials.