Competing for Competence

Educators use student contests in the STEM fields to build knowledge and skills that complement the curriculum.

By Andrew Trotter

Alexandria, Va.

For students at an academic conference outside the nation’s capital last fall, a small but intensive robotics competition enlivened the standard fare of panels, lectures, and sightseeing with a jolt of competitive energy.

Teenagers crowded into a lab here at the host school, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, and worked in teams to write a computer program that could steer a robot car—armed with a straight pin—to an explosive rendezvous with a balloon.

After several feverish hours spent working on computers and testing their robots in a large wooden maze, students put their programmed robots to a timed trial. The top finishers then faced another challenge: They had 15 minutes to direct their robots to skirt around an obstacle and park on a square at the opposite end of a...