Finding Time for ROV Team Leads Steven Dotts to New Career Path & Awards

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Two years ago Steven Dotts thought he was too busy to become involved in the Estrella Mountain Community College’s remotely operated vehicle (ROV) team as a professor recommended. Dotts works as an aircraft maintenance technician while taking classes at the Arizona college.

At the ATE PI Conference Steven Dotts talked about his team’s experiences at the MATE ROV Competition. (EPNAC.com)

Then one day while working in the campus makerspace he heard team members talking. He offered a few suggestions. The team members appreciated his tips and Dotts eventually joined the team. That first year he had minor roles. But before the start of the 2023-2024 he agreed to be Desert Star Robotics team’s chief executive officer.

At the 2024 MATE ROV World Championship, Dotts and his Desert Star Robotics teammates won second place in the PIONEER Class where they competed against other two-year colleges. (The team is in purple in this video about the 2024 competition.)

Dotts received the international competition’s top award – the Martin Klein MATE MARINER Award that includes a $1,000 cash award.

Each year the award is presented by Klein, who is the inventor of the side scan sonar, to a student who demonstrates not only technical aptitude, “but a passion and commitment to the field of marine science and technology,” according to Jill Zande, MATE’s executive director.

Zande reported that the judge who nominated Dotts called him “a prodigy” and in his notes added “But he and the world [have] yet to realize it."

During a plenary session discussion with three other alumni of ATE grant-funded projects at the 2024 Advanced Technological Education (ATE) Principal Investigators’ Conference and in an interview at the conference, Dotts shared insights he gained from his five-plus years of working as an aviation technician and two years of participating in ROV competitions.

Career Path Turns Unexpectedly from Air to Sea

Dotts has worked as an aircraft maintenance technician since graduating from high school in 2019. He attended the aviation maintenance program at Western Maricopa Education Center (West-MEC), a technical high school. During his junior and senior years, his afternoons were devoted to aircraft mechanics lessons. He earned the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) Airframe and Powerplant certificates around the time he graduated from high school.

“There were options to continue to get the college degree, but I already knew that sometime in the future I wanted to continue on with engineering. So I just focused mainly on those [FAA] credentials,” he said in an interview during the student showcase session at the ATE PI Conference.

Steven Dotts (center) and his Desert Star Robotics teammates won second place at the 2024 MATE ROV Competition. (MATE)

When he enrolled at Estrella Mountain Community College in 2020 Dotts’s plan was to take engineering courses and transfer to Arizona State University (ASU) for a bachelor’s degree in engineering. His long-term goal was to help “apply my knowledge and technical expertise elsewhere.”

He did not have an exact target for where that might be. However, living and working in the desert, Dotts had not expected that a team competition that focuses on creating underwater robots would be relevant to his career goals.  

But shortly after that first interaction with the team in the campus makerspace, Dotts found a lot of crossover: “The technical skills that I learned through my technician program and my technical education applied everywhere.”

Through the marine ROV competitions he has found a match between his talents and interests in doing systems engineering jobs that combine hydrology and electricity, and focus on the interface between with ships’ and ROVs’ instrumentation. He will transfer to ASU in spring 2025.  

MATE ROV Competition Builds Technical & Soft Skills

The MATE ROV competition, which began in 2001 with Advanced Technological Education grant support from the National Science Foundation, aims to help students develop technical and soft skills through the use of real-world tasks. Dotts explained that these tasks include placing undersea cables, taking sediment samples, quantifying fish populations, and monitoring coral reefs.

For the 2023-2024 competition season, Dotts did quite a bit of work on the team’s vertical profiler. This device uses a buoyancy engine to descend and ascend. During the MATE competition it measured depth and temperature. Dotts explained that in the real world profilers also monitor other things, such as conductivity and turbidity.

While talking in front of a scientific poster about the team’s ROV during the ATE PI Conference’s ATE Student/Alumni Poster Session, Dotts said designing underwater ROVs “uses a lot of the technical skills that ATE is kind of looking for—additive manufacturing, physics, designing around physics, circuit design and manufacture.”

In addition to operating their ROVs to do specific operations in swimming pools, teams that participate in the MATE ROV Competition are judged on their oral presentations, marketing plans, and technical documents. 

Zande said the presentations, marketing plans, and technical documents are worth nearly half of the points a team can score, because the soft skills required to do them are extremely important to marine technology employers.

Encouraging more community college students to participate in the marine ROV competitions is the focus of MATE’s current ATE project. MATE began as an ATE center at Monterey Community College and is now sustained by the Marine Technology Society.

With support of ATE grants (2031249 and 2333039) MATE provides community college teams with a ROV starter kit, instructional materials, mentoring, Evaluate-Compete’s resources, and funds to travel to competitions.

After two years of competing with support from MATE, Dotts said the Estrella Mountain Community College team is gathering support from local sponsors for the current year’s competition. Recruiting students is an ongoing process.

 “People at community college are generally not there because they have the time to be able to go do a higher education degree. They're there because they need their education degree to continue on their career path,” he said.

Having overcome that challenge himself, Dotts explained in an email that he persuades other students to join the team by showing how MATE gives them a platform to build their skills, especially in engineering. “There are a lot of students that have interest in applying what they learn in their programs, but struggle to find good projects and or the funding for them. That combined with frequent outreach and events helps bring in students,” Dotts wrote in reply to a question about his strategy for recruiting other students for the team.

Dotts Offers Suggestions to Faculty

Steven Dotts (far left) and three other alumni of ATE projects offered advice during a panel discussion. (EPNAC.com)

He also has some suggestions for faculty and what they cover in their courses. 

From his years of working in the heavily regulated aviation maintenance industry, Dotts suggests community college faculty include more about regulators’ influence in their curricula. He said students need to understand how regulations will affect their day-to-day work as technicians.

He also recommended that educators reach out to regulators in the fields they teach, as they do other industry partners.

This might help fill gaps such as those he experienced between aviation maintenance lessons, which for him began with wooden fabric structures, and technical innovations— such as trend monitoring and data analysis—that he learned on the job.

“In aviation maintenance, you have the increased amount of data science that's being used in trend monitoring, being able to teach trend monitoring beyond just saying, this is what we do and this is why. Trend monitoring [is] being improved every day with things like AI [artificial intelligence]. And yeah, it's not just the structures and industry context. [It’s] also working with regulators too,” he said.

He’s also observed that there can be disconnects between faculty, who already know what they're trying to teach, and students who are in the process of understanding academic and technical topics.

“So one thing that I found is when you work through near-peer mentoring, the students who have just gone through that learning process are able to connect more with the students who are currently going through that process and easily see where they may be hanging up,” he said.

The panel discussion closed with V. Celeste Carter, the lead program director of ATE who moderated the plenary session, asking whether the students had any advice for other students.

Dotts said, “Use that curiosity to always keep learning because in all of these programs, the training that you guys get is only the beginning. It's once you get out to industry, you're going to be working with these emerging technologies. You're going to be working with things that never even reached your school. You're going to work with things that you can't even imagine. And as long as you keep on learning and keep on expanding your knowledge, it helps keep you current and keep you fresh.”

Categories:
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From:
    ATE Impacts

Last Edited: December 9th, 2024 at 7:30am by Madeline Patton

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