Every year, students around the globe take part in the 2021 MATE ROV Competition, a world competition where teams of students build Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROV’s) to perform tasks underwater and engage with a global community of learners.
In early August, the competition was held virtually while challenging students to tackle problems that impact the entire world. Those problems included plastics clogging our rivers, lakes, waterways and oceans; climate change raising ocean temperatures; and contaminants in our waterways.
This year, St. Cloud State University helped support the competition in part due to the University’s Visualization Lab — a state-of-the-art science, technology, engineering, art and math (STEAM) lab — being part of the National Center for Autonomous Technology (NCAT).
St. Cloud State students helped organizers construct virtual reality worlds in Atlspace, the house of ROV events, and acted as event support staff during the competition. They also held a few workshops on building worlds while encouraging teams taking part in the competition to get into the virtual reality space and build their own worlds.
MATE’s mission is to inspire and challenge students to learn and creatively apply science, technology, engineering and math to solve real-world problems in a way that strengthens critical thinking, collaboration, entrepreneurship and innovation.
