Pahrump 4-H robotics team adds mentor to preserve design skills
A new SolidWorks mentor is giving Awkward Silence a way to keep robotics design skills in Pahrump after older students age out.
Pahrump’s Awkward Silence robotics team has added a new mentor, James Larsen, to keep its design knowledge from walking out the door with graduating students. The move is meant to solve a familiar rural program problem: making sure the next crop of students can build on hard-won engineering skills instead of starting over every season.
Larsen has been teaching SolidWorks and leading weekly training sessions centered on computer-aided design, giving students a deeper run at the software and design habits that matter in FIRST Tech Challenge competition. Coach Jennifer Riendeau said that kind of support fills a critical gap, because robotics teams can move fast on build season only if students know how to shape parts, test ideas and translate a concept into something that actually fits on a robot.
The students are now working through the fundamentals of SolidWorks with existing robot components before moving toward custom parts of their own. Southern Nye County 4-H said the team meets in person at least twice a week for robot build and engineering work, and the program also mentors teams at all levels across southern Nevada. That makes the Pahrump group more than a single competition squad: it has become part of the region’s training ladder.
That ladder showed up again at the team’s FIRST LEGO League summer camp, where younger and older divisions worked side by side on Saturday, June 6. The camp has been used as a pipeline for new talent, and previous Pahrump coverage said it was offered free to the public every Saturday in June from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. for students ages 6 to 18. FIRST LEGO League serves kids ages 5 to 16 and emphasizes hands-on STEM, teamwork, creativity and problem-solving.
The continuity effort matters in a county where 4-H is spread across the 4-H Annex at 1651 E. Calvada Blvd. in Pahrump, plus activities in Amargosa, Beatty and online through Zoom. University of Nevada, Reno Extension says 4-H clubs serve youth ages 5 to 19 and build problem-solving, leadership and career development skills. Nye County’s 2019-2020 report counted 863 youth in 4-H educational programming in Southern Nye County, including 105 organized club members and 23 leaders in Pahrump.
Awkward Silence has already shown it can turn that structure into results. The team qualified for the Nevada FTC state championship in Reno in February after winning the league championship in Las Vegas at The Meadows on February 7. At state, it started 14th out of 47 teams and climbed to 10th after alliance selections, with Word of Life Christian Academy’s first-year Little G-Bots joining its semifinal alliance.
The challenge now is financial as well as technical. In March, the team leaned on a Kiss the Pig fundraiser at Pahrump Moose Lodge #808 to help cover travel, equipment and competition costs. With veterans nearing graduation and a new mentor teaching CAD, Pahrump’s robotics program is trying to build something sturdier than a season-by-season win streak: a repeatable system for passing STEM skills to the next class.
This article was produced by Prism’s automated news system from verified source data, official records, and press releases, then run through automated quality and moderation checks before publishing. The system is built and supervised by the people who set the standards it runs under. Read our full AI policy.
Did this article answer your question?
