Gloucester Alumni

By Douglas A. Moser , Staff writer
Gloucester Daily Times

The Gloucester Education Foundation received a $6,000 grant from NASA to boost robotics instruction at the high school.

With the grant from a NASA program called the Robotics Alliance Project, John Chiffer and Kurt Lichtenwald, science teachers at Gloucester High School, will form a team of students to build a robot to complete a certain task assigned by NASA in competition with other schools in the region. None of the participating schools around the country knows what that task will be until January.

Gloucester will compete against schools in the Boston area. Rosa said the $6,000 will get them started in the contest, and NASA will send a kit with the basics of a robot and the assigned task. The space agency will also set the completion date, which will be the same for all the competing schools.

Joseph Rosa, a member of the foundation's board of directors, said the school would likely receive the grant again next year to continue building the program, then future grants would be determined based on Gloucester's performance in the competitions.

"After the first year, it gets really competitive," he said.

"This is really a way to take what we've been doing with robotics to the next level," Chiffer said.

He and Lichtenwald have been teaching robotics in their physics classes for eight years, receiving help with a grant from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Students "take basic rudimentary building blocks, like PVC pipe, wax, film canisters, and you build a vehicle that goes under water and is remotely controlled," Chiffer said.

Lichtenwald has several underwater vehicles hanging from the ceiling of his classroom, all of which were made by past students. During a presentation to MIT, Lichtenwald said he showed one vehicle called Quicksilver which, rather than having a standard form with PVC pipe, was made of watertight motors bought off eBay.

"They were just blown away," Lichtenwald said.

Melissa Moceri, a 2005 graduate who was part of the team that built Quicksilver, said the entire group had a great time designing and building the machine.

Lichtenwald told the groups in his class what kinds of things the robots should be doing and let them figure the rest out on their own.

"He just said to do what you want with it, and that was the greatest part of it," Moceri said.

From December 2004 through June 2005, the groups designed the machine, found parts for it, assembled it, and compiled a very detailed manual explaining how the robot works, demonstrating it functioning and showing the students throughout the project.

During the final weeks of school, Moceri said the groups took their work to the Annisquam River. Using cameras, acoustic sensors and motors, the robots also searched the riverbed for objects.

Lichtenwald and Chiffer expect between 10 and 15 students to participate in the competition.