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kids playing with robots

UA Engineering student and UA RoboClub member Luis Sanchez, right, entertains some young festival-goers while teaching them a few basics about robotics at the Phoenix Best Fest Feb. 11-12.

UA Engineering Celebrates Arizona's Centennial

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UA Engineering Celebrates Arizona's Centennial

Feb. 14, 2012
The Arizona Best Fest is a series of festivals organized by the Arizona Centennial Commission to celebrate Arizona's first 100 years of statehood.

Following a successful show at the Prescott, Arizona Best Fest in September 2011, UA Engineering repeated the success at the Phoenix Arizona Best Fest Feb. 11-12.

The Arizona Best Fest is a series of festivals organized by the Arizona Centennial Commission to celebrate Arizona's first 100 years of statehood. Unofficial estimates calculate attendance at the Phoenix event at around 80,000. UA staff at the event estimate about 8,000 people visited the Science and the Future Pavilion. Today, Feb. 14, is the date Arizona became a state in 1912.

UA Engineering shared the Science and the Future Pavilion, sponsored by UA thanks to a generous gift from a UA supporter, with the College of Optical Sciences, Biosphere 2, the College of Science, Steward Observatory Mirror Laboratory, and the College of Medicine, Phoenix.

UA College of Engineering projects on display were Professor Wolfgang Fink's planetary rovers, Matt Bunting's hexapod robot, Lego robots provided by UA RoboClub, and the solar-powered car built and raced by Arizona Solar Racing.

Professor Fink and grad student Bunting are both in electrical and computer engineering; RoboClub is based in the department of aerospace and mechanical engineering; and the solar racing team are part of AzRISE, the Arizona Research Institute for Solar Energy.

Elsewhere in the Science and Future Pavilion, crowds saw a model of the Phoenix Mars Lander, took part in holographic demos by Optics College students, studied the universe via Biosphere 2's Omniglobe, or got instruction on how to do chest-compression-only CPR from medical students.