Lipscomb and Nissan kick-off its highly popular BisonBot robotics camps this week
Lacey Klotz |
Lipscomb University’s Raymond B. Jones College of Engineering, in conjunction with Nissan North America Inc., kicks-off its highly popular summer BisonBot Robotics Camps, including its second inner-city camp, this week.
Lipscomb and Nissan will offer six camps including its WeeBots Robotics camp for kids ages 6-8, two Junior BisonBot Robotics camps for kids ages 8-11, two Fundamental BisonBot Robotics camps for kids ages 10-14 and the Advanced BisonBot camp for kids ages 12 and up. 
“For 10 years, Lipscomb and Nissan have teamed up to provide an environment to engage and inspire future engineers and problem solvers through our BisonBot robotics camps,” said Ginger Reasonover, co-director of the BisonBot Robotics Camps and hands-on science coordinator at Lipscomb Academy. “Each camp incorporates important STEM concepts which are used so heavily in today’s technology. It’s fun for campers to realize how science, technology, engineering and math concepts all work together and how they are all used to make robots used in surgeries, cars, factories and so many places today.”
For its second year, Lipscomb University will bring its Fundamentals BisonBot Robotic Camp to an inner-city community where sixteen 10-14 year-olds will learn basic robotic principles involving electrical circuits, batteries, switches, DC motors and robotic arm-and-hand actuators, July 18-22.
Through a partnership with Youth Encouragement Services and Lipscomb’s Peugeot Center for Engineering Service in Developing Communities, Lipscomb will send a small team of four electrical and computer engineering students, along with John Hutson, assistant professor in the college, and others, to the YES McIver Street Center. In addition to helping students build their own challenging five-degree-of-freedom robotic arm, the team will invest in the YES staff and kids throughout the week with devotionals, group activities and meals.
“The students at YES are mostly in ‘at-risk’ situations such as poverty, illiteracy, crime, drugs, violence, and so on, and what we do at YES is to provide more opportunities for them to succeed in school, at home, in faith, and in life,” said Daniel Burnell, the McIver Center director for Youth Encouragement Services. “Volunteers and programs like the Lipscomb University engineering mission group, help to provide the opportunities that we want our students to have and help show our students the love of Christ while also teaching them life skills.”
Since 2010, Nissan has donated approximately $350,000 total to fund Lipscomb’s summer BisonBot Robotic Camps and the annual Music City BEST (Boosting Engineering, Science and Technology) 
competition. The partnership adds value and expertise to each camp as Nissan provides engineers to help teach during the six summer camps. The Fundamental BisonBot Robotics camp will also get to see the Nissan engineers in action when they visit Nissan’s Smyrna plant on Tuesday, July 12.
“Nissan is committed to supporting educational programs such as the robotics camps and competitions, because they help launch a new generation of engineers, scientists and problem solvers,” said Vicki Smith, Nissan’s senior manager of corporate social responsibility. “We hope that students come away from these events with a set of skills that will set them up for success for any educational paths they may pursue.”
For its third consecutive year, the Advanced BisonBot Robotics camp will spend a day visiting Saint Thomas West’s robotic surgical suite to observe and interact with the robots used in surgeries at Saint Thomas West.
“Given the advancements we have seen in computers and technology in the last decade, particularly in relation to health care, we view our partnership with Lipscomb University as essential to growing our understanding of where medicine and patient care, can go,” said Dr. Benjamin Dehner, chief of urology at Saint Thomas West in Nashville.
“Over the next decade we will see an explosion of robotic and biomechanical options for patient care and the campers who are able to see where we are today will be the ones to make these advances happen. I believe that by seeing real-world applications of mathematics and engineering and how they can impact patients will help these students excel in their future studies.”