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CSUDH in talks for Mayme A. Clayton Library & Museum collection p. 3 The Habits and Nia Andrews’ Art of Storytelling p. 9 Conrad’s Mexican Grill: Mexican and Peruvian cuisine with a large vegan menu p. 10
The Habits
Today’s BattleBot Competitor, Tomorrow’s Engineer By Hunter Chase, Reporter
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Rolling Robots student Sean Stassi poses with the insides of Shellshock, the robot he helped design for BattleBots. Photo by Terelle Jerricks
Escaping Trump’s Twitter Trap:
Eleven Things the Media Can Do Differently
[See Twitter p. 5]
[See BattleBots p. 4]
But that’s a false dichotomy, media critic Jay Rosen, noted on Twitter. And a few weeks later, the El Paso massacre showed it wasn’t a dichotomy at all: repeating and amplifying Trump’s hateful antiimmigrant rhetoric helped normalize it so much that 20 people lay dead as a result—and two more have
Robots became Stassi’s passion before he started grade school when his parents bought him his first Lego set. In elementary school, Stassi joined his school’s Lego League team. The Lego League was established by the education nonprofit, FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), which was founded in 1989. One of the guiding principles of FIRST is what’s called gracious professionalism — a way of doing things that encourages high-quality work, emphasizes the value of others and respects individuals and the community. With gracious professionalism, fierce competition and mutual gain are not separate notions. Heise, Stassi’s Shellshock team mate and a more
By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor
August 8 - 21, 2019
After two-and-a-half years in office, the press is still befuddled by how to cover Donald Trump. On July 14, the Los Angeles Times editorial board wrote, “We shouldn’t rise to his bait, but how can we not? If we ignore him, we normalize his reckless behavior, and that’s even worse.”
Stassi, the Competition and Shellshock
Real News, Real People, Really Effective
250-pound machine created purely for destruction may sound like something from a science fiction movie, but it’s reality for five students from Palos Verdes. They designed and built a robot with solid steel armor that spins three blades at 200 miles an hour. Rancho Palos Verdes residents Sean Stassi and Trevor Heise were featured in the third season of BattleBots, a fighting robot reality series. The show consists of robots competing in three-minute one-on-one bouts with the goal of destroying or disabling the opponent. If there is no knockout during the battle, a panel of judges declares the winner. Stassi and Heise, along with their team and mentors at Rolling Robots, a nonprofit robotics school in Palos Verdes, built Shellshock, a turtle-shaped robot. Stassi and Heise are also representative of the future Rolling Robots founder George Kirkman is trying to raise and bring the future of automation and robotics into the present. To Kirkman, the fight over converting Pier 400 into a fully automated cargo terminal is an opportunity to further the conversation of building up a new generation of engineers and mechanics to develop, build and maintain tomorrow’s machines.
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