Overview
Region 6 conferences typically offer a student poster presentation event with prizes. See the individual conference websites for details.
K – 12 Competitions
BEST Robotics
BEST Robotics is a non-profit, volunteer organization whose mission is to inspire students to pursue careers in engineering, science, and technology through participation in a sports-like, science- and engineering-based robotics competition.
FIRST
Founded in 1989 by inventor Dean Kamen, FIRST® is a global nonprofit organization that prepares young people for the future through a suite of life-changing youth robotics programs that build skills, confidence, and resilience. Participants master skills and concepts to aid in learning science and technology through innovative projects and robotics competitions, while gaining valuable employment and life skills.
Future City Competition
The mission of the National Engineers Week Future City Competition is to provide a fun and exciting educational engineering program for seventh- and eighth-grade students that combines a stimulating engineering challenge with a “hands-on” application to present their vision of a city of the future.
High School SMART Competition
The SMART Competition is a global Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) and hands-on, Career Technology Education (CTE) based real-world engineering experience for high school students. The Competition promotes sustainable design, use of renewable technology, improving energy efficiency and the smart grid.
Student teams are asked to redesign a poorly constructed gymnasium on a high school campus using engineering design software provided by Bentley Systems. The students make the building more energy efficient and incorporate sustainable designs into their final model. The also add renewable energy systems to their campus to generate power for the community. Solutions address sustainability, energy efficiency, power generation, communications and transportation.
University Competitions
IEEEXtreme
IEEEXtreme is a global challenge in which teams of IEEE Student members – advised and proctored by an IEEE member, and often supported by an IEEE Student Branch – compete in a 24-hour time span against each other to solve a set of programming problems.
Region 6 Pitch Your Idea
IEEE Region 6 Pitch Your Idea offers prize money for students who upload a persuasive pitch for their next project, company idea, or hackathon team. Communication is everything these days, and the only way to get attention and funding for your ideas is to present them in a concise, compelling way. This competition is for students to upload a video to YouTube (maximum length 2 minutes) where they do ONE (not all!) of the following:
- Pitch a project — say you want to work on a cool extracurricular project, either for a hackathon, capstone, or simply for fun. This kind of pitch is to attract your fellow IEEE Student Members as talent to help you get the project moving
- Pitch your research — say you want to advance your undergraduate research. This kind of pitch is to persuade your faculty advisor to provide you the resources to let you go deeper in pursuit of a research question of interest to you both.
- Pitch IEEE! — say you want to recruit new members to join your branch. Why would they join? How would they benefit? What if they don’t have any spare time?
