Summary: / Best Robotics – Central Alabama Community College / Alabama is quickly becoming a national leader in robotics technology instruction and implementation with the Alabama Robotics Technology park in Decatur and with major industrial partners expanding their robotic inventory. So it seems only natural that the education needed to pursue jobs in these industry sectors would start in middle and high school. Enter the BEST program or Boosting Engineering Science and Technology. The mission of the program is to inspire students to pursue careers in engineering, science, technology, and math through participation in a sports-like science- and engineering-based robotics competition. It’s this sports-like competition that brought us to Wallace State Community College in Selma. They hosted a regional competition involving 20 middle and high school teams from 12 counties in Alabama. Called the Great Freight Challenge, students from participating schools had to build and program their robots before the competition. We caught up with the students and instructor from Tipton-Durant Middle School in Selma a week before the competition
