Monday, March 12, 2012

STEM Competitions

FIRST Robotics

FIRST Robotics, an international educational program that encourages student engagement with science and
challenges student teams to solve a common engineering problem over a six-week time period using a standard kit of parts with no instructions. In 2008, the inaugural FIRST
Hawaii Regional Robotics Competition hosted over 700 students (including 450 from Hawaii) and drew approximately 2,000 spectators. This year, 36 teams will compete at the FIRST in Hawaii Regional Robotics Competition, March 22-24, 2012 at the University of Hawaii at Manoa's Stan Sheriff Center.


Botball

The Hawaii Botball region is the largest in America and this program provides students with the skills, experience and opportunities to succeed as they work on teams to design, build and program a pair of autonomous robots for regional and international competitions. The Botball Educational Robotics Program engages middle and high school students in a team-oriented robotics competition by having them design, build, program, and document their robots.




FIRST LEGO League

FIRST LEGO League is a robotics program for 9 to 16 year olds and is designed to create excitement in children about science and technology while teaching them valuable employment and life skills. The competition themes typically reflect a current global challenge and students work together to build robots and prepare presentations on their research and construction.






VEX Robotics

VEX Robotics encourages teamwork, leadership and problem solving among groups. It also allows educators to easily customize projects to meet the level of students' abilities. The intent of the program is to be accessible to middle and high school students where beginner builders can design and assemble their robots through trial and error.

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Friday, August 13, 2010

Increasing Hawaii's High-Speed Broadband Communications: Act 199 (HB2698 HD2 SD2 CD1)

The Hawaii Broadband Task Force was established by the Legislature in 2007 to address the availability, capability, affordability, and use of broadband services in Hawaii. In light of economic times, Act 199 begins a modest implementation of recommendations while the economy begins to recover. A key component of Act 199 requires convening a work group to streamline the permitting process to further the development of broadband services and technology.

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Friday, August 13, 2010

Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism (DBEDT) & State Foundation on Culture and the Arts Layoffs

Among the programs which suffered State staffing cutbacks were the State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, and DBEDT. The EDT committee held two joint informational briefings with the House EBM committee in the interim prior to the 2010 session. During the session, the EDT committee developed bills to stabilize key economic programs and activities. The committee will continue to push these types of bills forward.

View informational briefing agendas and committee reports in "Documents & Links".

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Thursday, August 12, 2010

Act 221

Further attempts were made to eliminate Act 221 credits (SB2001, SB2401) during the 2010 session. Here are Senator Fukunaga's April 27, 2010 floor remarks speaking in opposition of SB 2401: "...The House's amendment to S.B. 2401, S.D. 1 [has] raised numerous constitutional concerns, which means that if adopted, the bill will be challenged immediately on the following grounds: It violates due process protections, depriving Hawai‘i taxpayers of property without due process in violation of the U.S. and the Hawai‘i constitutions, and effectively confiscates the credits for three years... Read more