Designing, building and programming robots is all in a day’s work for Kristy Brannon.

The high school engineering and robotics teacher has helped roll out a new career and technical program for Vicksburg Warren School District this year.

“This is a brand new course,” Brannon said. “It’s engineering design in the spring and engineering fundamentals in the fall.”

The courses take place at the new engineering lab at Hinds Community College in Vicksburg. Brannon teaches three sections of each course and has about 40 students total in the program.

“We focus a lot on mechanical engineering after we do a general overview of what engineers do and the engineering design process,” she said. “We spend a lot of time on robots: designing them, building them and programming them.”

Students are paired up in small groups of two to three for the projects.

“They’re programming right now,’ Brannon said. “They built their robots in January.”

The students have recently been tasking their robots with completing a maze, and this week, they were given sensors.

“Their exam is to incorporate three different sensors to finish the challenge,” she said. “We’ve been using a sonar sensor, a touch sensor and a line tracker.”

There are online lessons, which allows certain students with more experience to advance at their own pace.

“It’s been really cool to have a small enough classroom and the resources to do differentiated instruction to keep the less experienced ones going and let my kids with more experience just run,” Brannon said.

Brannon said she’s taught pretty much every math and science course available at the high school level, but nothing beats hands-on learning.

“I went to Mississippi School for Math and Science,” she said. “I still remember some of the projects I did in some of the classes there that were extremely problem based learning and hands on.”

That’s what makes her tick.

“It makes it easier to teach a class in that manner for me because I have that background,” she said. “I also haven’t had any behavior problems. They like to work together.”

The class will obviously set students up for a career in engineering, but Brannon said there are also career and technical opportunities available for students in her program.

“Most offshore oil rigs now have an underwater robot that is there to help oversee and maintain stuff,” she said. “The drone stuff is really big now; everybody is wanting that. Kids here will probably be equipped to build their own.”

Brannon said students could also work in a factory on robotic arms or for a police force maintaining their bomb disposal drones.

“The sky is the limit,” she said. “With this kind of background, they can really do anything.”