NASA/JPL education specialist Ota Lutz offers tips to parents and students.


If your child likes robotics, how can you encourage this interest?
Ota Lutz
NASA/JPL education specialist
Former math teacher

If your child is really interested in robotics, and a lot of kids are, they see the robots on Mars and they're like, I want to do that when I grow up, totally encourage them to do that because that is a really, really super-fun career.

They do need go solid math and science background so of course encourage them to do their math and science.

When they get to middle school and high school, take computer science classes.
They'll have the opportunity to learn how to program a computer.

Starting as early as third grade, you can buy a robotics kit for your child to use at home.
They can build little robots that go forward, backward, turn left, turn right and that will come in really handy because right around 5th grade, 6th grade and middle school, all the way up into high school, there are competitions that your students can be involved in.

They can do them as a group, as a team, they're like "Okay I got my robot here, I got to make it do this, how do I make that happen?" and it's always within a certain amount of time so the kids are under pressure but it gives them something really good to strive for and it's actually developing the skills that they would use in a robotics engineering career.

For more information about careers in science and engineering:

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