Adapting a STEM Robotics Program to the Covid-19 Pandemic - a validation of the proposal presented at ISEC in 2021

In late 2020 the hosts of the IEEE Robot Challenge, a STEaM project requiring close teamwork among high school and middle school students, realized that it would not be able to comply with the COVID-19 restrictions that would likely be in place in early 2021. The project, originally developed by the IEEE Baltimore Section for the Baltimore Museum of Industry (BMI) as part of their Maryland Engineering Challenges program (MEC), would need to be modified significantly, yet it had to maintain a high level of teamwork (now likely to be on-line), and a comparable level of “challenge” to the earlier in-person version generally held at the BMI. The 3 phases of the Challenge event as well as the robots themselves, would need to be re-designed, and there would be little time for mistakes or rework, as all details of the project would need to perform correctly the first (and possibly only) time they would be used. With the assistance of a group of Systems Engineers, all steps were analyzed and evaluated for their effectiveness and reliability, and on May 25, 2021, the Challenge was held using Zoom as the controlling system. The methodology that we planned to employ was outlined in a paper with this name that was presented at the 2021 ISEC conference [1]. The purpose of this 2022 paper is to measure and evaluate the success of the systems engineering studies and how they could be applied to other projects. Unexpectedly, Covid 19 is still with us, so the Virtual Challenge will again be offered for the April 23, 2022 event, though an “in-person” Challenge will also be available on another day.