Greater than 600 groups of Santa Clara County college students gathered on the San Jose McEnery Conference Middle’s South Corridor this weekend, wanting to learn how the gadgets they constructed carried out on this 12 months’s Tech Problem — an engineering showcase that has been a signature occasion of the Tech Interactive since 1988.
Somebody’s who’s been there for all 38 iterations is Greg Brown, a San Jose engineer who helped discovered the occasion a decade earlier than the Tech even had its acquainted mango-and-azure constructing downtown.
Brown was a pupil at Stanford within the prehistoric days of the Tech and thought a enjoyable technique to promote the training middle’s potential was for younger college students attempt their hand at a few of the similar design challenges that faculty college students labored on. The primary Tech Problem centered on constructing a tool that might cross over a two-foot-gap between two tables. A couple of half-dozen groups confirmed up for these first finals.
“It sounds pretty easy, but it wasn’t that easy. That became the first criterion of the Tech Challenge: Make it sound deceptively simple,” Brown mentioned, now 71. “Teams would see from their first try they had to go back and make it better.”
Almost 40 years later, the Tech Problem has grown exponentially however remains to be deceptively easy: This 12 months’s problem, “Gravitate to Navigate,” tasked groups — fabricated from of fourth-graders to highschool seniors — with constructing a gravity-powered gadget able to traversing a number of tracks, ahead and backward, whereas carrying a tennis ball.
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Aarohi, from group Cobra Kai, provides Greg Brown, the founding father of the Tech Problem, a excessive 5 throughout The thirty eighth Annual Tech Problem: Gravitate to Navigate in San Jose, Calif., on Saturday, Might 3, 2025. (Shae Hammond/Bay Space Information Group)
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Aarohi, from group Cobra Kai, provides Greg Brown, the founding father of the Tech Problem, a excessive 5 throughout The thirty eighth Annual Tech Problem: Gravitate to Navigate in San Jose, Calif., on Saturday, Might 3, 2025. (Shae Hammond/Bay Space Information Group)
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Some groups managed to hit all of the marks, however — as Brown rapidly notes — that’s nearly irrelevant. Awards are additionally introduced for attention-grabbing designs, journaling their progress, taking applicable security measures and discovering a task for all group members. Yow will discover out extra about this 12 months’s problem, in addition to see a listing of award winners at www.thetech.org.
One other enjoyable custom on the Tech Problem that Brown enjoys is the way in which groups give you humorous names or put on elaborate costumes to the showcase. He even takes half: Since 2008 or so, he’s worn a distinct exhausting hat annually with a inventive, whimsical contraption associated to that 12 months’s problem.
“As the event got bigger, people sort of looked to me sometimes to feel like it’s OK to have fun,” he mentioned. “If I’m a goofball, other people know it’s OK to be a goofball, too.”
Brown — who labored for the Tech and later for the nonprofit Useful resource Space For Educating — doesn’t foresee a time when he received’t volunteer for the Tech Problem. When the finals finish, he says goodbye to groups as they depart. Alongside the way in which, he’s heard tales about dad and mom and youngsters bonding over the work, about former Tech Problem members who are actually academics or have children of their very own collaborating. He says it’s not a straightforward occasion to provide annually, and he hopes folks — particularly company sponsors and different funders — notice what an establishment it’s change into.
“A lot of people in the community might not realize the profound impact this program has on the future lives of students,” Brown mentioned. “The kids see themselves differently after they participate in the Tech Challenge. They realize they have more options than they thought they did. We’re helping young people at a very key moment in their lives, when they can make decisions and have insights about themselves that can affect them positively for the rest of their lives.”
ENCOURAGING CREATIVITY: Debi Pradad Sahoo is founder and CEO of Community Financials (NetFin), a San Jose software program improvement startup. So it’d shock you that he thinks children might use a break from all of the tech of their lives. That’s why NetFin has launched “Unplug & Imagine,” an artwork contest that challenges elementary faculty college students to make use of their creativity to make a bit of unique artwork across the theme “When Screens Turn Off.” The largest rule? The artwork must be hand drawn, painted or coloured — no digital instruments allowed.
Mockingly, whereas the artwork can’t be made digitally, it nonetheless should be submitted electronically by Might 11. Awards — together with $100 in present playing cards — might be given to the highest three submissions. Get extra info at network-financials.com/trova-connect.
GO FIGURE: Retired Redwood Metropolis instructor Ron Gordon referred to as me over the weekend to remind me that Monday was not solely Cinco de Mayo, it additionally was Sq. Root Day — 5/5/25. Gordon began Sq. Root Day celebrations again on 9/9/81 and is hopeful he’ll nonetheless be round for the subsequent one, 6/6/36, when he’ll be in his 90s.
And as he has earlier than, Gordon is holding a contest to see who can contain the most individuals in a “Square Root” celebration. Entries can embrace creating the biggest sq. root signal from folks, serving root beer in sq. glasses to probably the most of us or reducing as many roots as you possibly can into squares (nicely, cubes) for a square-root stew. There’s a money prize — $552.50 — Gordon plans to separate among the many successful entries. You may test it out at squarerootday.web.
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