Earl Scime: Physicist, Laser-Builder, and Now FIRST’s Mentor of the Year

Earl Scime: Physicist, Laser-Builder, and Now FIRST’s Mentor of the Year

Earl Scime is part of the team that designed the particle cameras on spacecraft TWINS I and II, which are now collecting and analyzing spectroscopic data for NASA. He helped build a new laser system to be used in magnetic fusion experiments. He’s the chair of the physics department at West Virginia University. And he’s a great mentor.

At the FIRST robotics national championship this weekend, Scime won the Woodie Flowers Award, given to one team mentor each year. Scime had no idea his teamâ€"Mountaineer Area Robotics of Morgantown, W.Va., or MARSâ€"had nominated him and was "astonished" when his name was called at the championships in St. Louis.

Scime’s team members say he’s changed their lives by showing them that it’s cool to be smart. "In middle school, I was the weird, geeky girl who nobody talked to unless they needed to know the answer to number three on the math homework," team member Emily Raque says. She credits Scime and MARS for changing that. "I’ve really been able to burst out and say I’m proud to be myself with the geeky side of me," she says.

Scime says he’s been coaching FIRST teams of varying levels for about a decade. He began by coaching his eldest son’s FIRST Lego League team and now coaches his youngest son’s FLL team as well as the MARS team. Kari DeMicco, the Mars team member who wrote the nomination letter for Scime, estimates he’s put more than 5800 hours into his teams throughout the years.

DeMicco and Raque say Scime has inspired some students who didn’t plan to go to college to get a higher education. "From a teacher to a father, any kind o f person you need in your life at that time, he gives you all of him," Raque says. "We really love him."

For his part, Scime says he wanted to participate in FIRST because there was nothing like it when he was growing up, and he finds it inspiring that the team members work hard even though they’re not getting a grade for it.

"Long-term, I hope they change the world," he says.

PopularMechanics.com RSS