(San Antonio, TX, July 18, 2005) ­ In its first year at San Antonio College, the Legos® for Logic Summer Camp will teach young people to think on their own, introduce them to a variety of technology applications and prepare them for a bright future.

Coordinated by SAC Computer Information Systems (CIS), with funds from Alamo Region Tech-Prep Consortium and Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board from the Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Applied Technology Education Act of 1998, incoming 9th and 10th grade students at all levels of math skill, including remedial, will work in teams and use Lego® Mindstorms® Robots for logic development exercises to improve their problem-solving skills and build their self-esteems.

Scheduled to run July 18 to 22 in the Nail Technical Center on the SAC campus, the camp is a project of the Tech Prep program that runs during the regular school year in which high school students begin their chosen course of study in high school and continue into courses at the community college, which lead to Associate of Applied Science degrees and/or technical careers.

The Legos® for Logic Summer Camp will teach math, science, physics, computer programming and some engineering. It also expands opportunities for high schools to develop Tech Prep articulation agreements with SAC in order to meet student and industry demands for computer programming education.

During the camp, students will perform maintenance and repairs on already-built Robots, which include digital logic gates that are the building blocks of computer processors. Students will learn computer programming and use math applications to measure distance and speed, and encode the Robots to use light sensors to react to sounds and physical obstacles by emitting a variety of tones. They will also learn to maneuver the Robots around obstacles, and how to get out of problem areas.

The camp culminates on Friday afternoon, July 22, with the River Walk Run event where students will apply all the learning in a friendly competition to move their Robots through a model of a tourist-infested site that runs alongside a ³river.² Preliminaries will be held in the morning to allow time for test runs and final adjustments, with final runs in the late afternoon.

³Through this program, we want to show how math and physics can be fun, and with technology being used in so many different careers, everyone can take technical courses to help achieve their dreams," said Program Coordinator Heidi Webb, also a member of the CIS faculty at SAC who was introduced to technology while working in the Northeast Hospital Laboratory. ³Also, today¹s students need to be able to think and solve problems on their own. I tell them that while many software applications have the capabilities for spell check or grammar check, the intelligence is not built in automatically; a human being wrote the program for that.²

During the week, guest speakers will talk about broad applications for technology and various related careers. Speakers include:

- Carol L. Redfield, Ph.D., St. Mary¹s University Associate Professor
and Graduate Program Director of Computer Science who also has more than 12 years of industry experience, having worked in artificial intelligence as a Senior Research Engineer at Southwest Research Institute and a Senior Scientist at Mei Technology Corporation.

- Mark Landis, KSRX-FM 102.7 K-Rock program director and former record
company VP of promotion, will talk about how technology is used in the radio and record industries - for music recording, mixing, distribution and live performances, as well as radio production and broadcast operations.

- Steve Winston, lead programmer, Linux expert, and technical analyst
for Global Gaming Innovations (G2I), a San Antonio-based, technology company whose main focus is the gaming market, specifically MMOG (Massive Multi-player Online) games. He is a 2002 graduate of Trinity University with a degree in Computer Science.

- Mike Thomas, San Antonio Business Journal reporter whose focus is
business news in the areas of high-tech/telecom, energy, military and state government/regulation, and will share some of his experiences working in the journalism field with technology.

- Sig Christenson, San Antonio Express News reporter who also works in
journalism with technology, and will share some of what he has learned about military technologies.

For more information, contact Heidi Webb at (210) 733-2291 or hwebb@cis.sac.accd.edu.