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UA senior is MVP on the winning team in national Hispanic engineering meet
Nov 07, 2009 (The Arizona Daily Star - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) --
Amanda Rubio knows how to be resourceful, creative, professional and productive -- all while sleep-deprived.
The senior chemical engineering major at the University of Arizona was part of the winning team at the Extreme Engineering Challenge, a 24-hour nonstop contest at the national conference of the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers last week in Washington, D.C.
Plus, she was named MVP.
The students were given an imagined scenario in which a professor found a new element on Mercury but was kidnapped by terrorists who demand that the team build a machine to go to space and bring back the element. All they had to start with were some notes they found on the professor's desk.
"It's really 24 hours -- you don't go to sleep," Rubio said. "You're given five tasks, but the tasks were only given to you one at a time, so you weren't really aware of what was going to be next, but you had to plan ahead."
The team, sponsored by Raytheon, threw out a few ideas during the night, but started building a machine right after breakfast, she said.
Rubio, who works two jobs while attending college, knew how to be resourceful given the limited provisions. She borrowed scissors from a maid and a knife from a painter, she said.
"When we were given our task of actually building the robot, we had the perfect design. . . . They said it was going to have to pick up, grasp and collect," she said.
The judges surprised most teams with a task to pick up a ball. Most robots had a shovel that couldn't handle a rolling object, but Rubio's team anticipated that problem and came up with a claw on an arm to grab items and put them in a bin.
Rubio, who graduates in May, said she loves applying math and chemistry to solve problems.
The UA chapter of SHPE took 60 students to the conference -- one more than its rival chapter at Arizona State University. The group's mission is academic development and outreach.
Contact reporter Becky Pallack at bpallack@azstarnet.com or 807-8012.
To see more of The Arizona Daily Star, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to
http://www.azstarnet.com. Copyright (c) 2009, The Arizona Daily Star, Tucson
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