For the first time in five years, the Texas Alliance for Minorities in Engineering (TAME) held the TAME State Engineering Competition for more than 200 student engineers. Elimini was the presenting partner for this year’s competition, which welcomed teams from across Texas to Rice University in Houston, while our colleagues volunteered to help facilitate the event as team mentors and judges.
The challenge, inspired by the Matt Damon film The Martian, tasked five-person teams with designing and building a device consisting of a hexadecimal system and a rotating laser pointer platform. They then had to time the rotation of the laser platform with each hexadecimal character to accurately receive and decode messages from NASA.
“Many of the most critical challenges we face as a global society will be solved by engineers, ranging from the warming of our planet to the predicted AI-driven energy crisis – so it’s easy to forget that engineering can also be fun,” said Lauren George, US Communities Manager at Elimini. “TAME has done a masterful job of crafting a contest that will stick with participants for life, inspiring many of them to enter STEM-related fields, and the Elimini team is grateful for the opportunity we had to support these students throughout the experience.”
For 50 years, TAME has offered extracurricular engineering education programs – including clubs, competitions and scholarships – for middle and high school students in communities statewide at no cost to students. It paused the annual state competition during the COVID-19 pandemic and just restarted it this year.
Elimini’s purpose is to remove carbon for good, which has a dual meaning of both permanently and for the benefit of our planet, communities, and stakeholders. Through our Elimini Foundation, we develop multi-year funding relationships to support nonprofit organizations that are working across our footprint to improve equitable access to STEM education and help protect and restore nature.
“Organizations collaborating with TAME have a tremendous opportunity to empower youth to explore engineering pathways and create new education and workforce pipelines, fostering socio-economic mobility in communities across the state,” said Krystal Peralez, Executive Director at TAME. “Elimini's commitment to TAME's mission and mentoring our young engineers at the State Competition ensured our participants had an exciting, challenging, and supportive experience they will carry with them the rest of their lives!”
To learn more about TAME, visit www.tame.org.
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