To emphasize this key message which is an eminent noble task, Charles Lord will talk about and walkthrough effective methods of using LEGO mindstorms robots for STEM motivational education in every level of academic institutions.  Rodney Radford will be helping on the demonstration part of the talk.  It is interesting to note, Lego Mindstom Nxt has opensource components abstracting a simple but efficient embedded systems - providing easy to use SDK(Software Development Kit), HDK(Hardware Development Kit) and BDK(Bluetooth Development kit) along with multiple programming languages including C, Python, Matlab, Ada, Lua & graphical NXT-G.
 
Dr. Paul MacDougal will present about Jetbot robot using NVIDIA Jetson Nano.  NVIDIA Jetson Nano is an affordable System On Modue(SOM) with CPU, GPU, Power Management IC, DRAM & Flash - a Maxwell architecture with 128 NVIDIA CUDA cores for performance and power efficiency to run autonomous machines, faster with less power. It is interesting to note, Jetbot has a Robot Operating System(ROS) port along with a model for Gazebo Robotics Simulator.
 
https://github.com/NVIDIA-AI-IOT/jetbot/wiki

Speaker Information:

Charles Lord PE is the Chair of Western North Carolina section, a veteran serving for the technology community through IEEE holding multiple positions in past few decades. Charles has also led several IEEE SouthEastCon conferences and the General Co-Chair of IEEE SouthEastCon 2020.  Rodney Radford is an expert senior embedded software developer and maker, Chair of IEEE NC Council and past IEEE RA24 chair.  Rodney also leads the Student and hardware competition programs in IEEE SouthEastcon 2020.

Dr. Paul MacDougal is a Design Engineer in the architecture team of NVIDIA designing and profiling advanced graphics architectures.  Paul holds a PhD in computer science from Ohio state university.