College students put to shame in engineering contest when a 10-YEAR-OLD boy wins top prize



An elementary school robot-geek proved was quite literally punching above his weight when he entered a college-level engineering contest in March, facing rivals two foot taller than him.

But by the end of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Southeastern competition, it was the university students looking up to10-year-old Davis Fortenberry not the other way around, as he walked away with first place.

At first competitors complained about Davis, of Piperton, when he showed up with his impressive robot invention, convinced he must be trying to pass off someone else’s work as his own.



10-year-old Davis Fortenberry beat university students in a college level engineering contest

But when Regina Hannemann, a researcher at the University of Kentucky, announced him as the winner the room erupted in a standing ovation.

‘This is a very, very intelligent boy,’ she said. ‘A 10-year-old doing this level of programming is astonishing.’

Judges of the contest, held in Orlando, were struck by the calm attitude of the fifth-grader, who seemed unfazed by it all, despite being up against 54 college teams.

Dan Kohn, assistant professor at the University of Memphis, said: He fit right in, which was just absolutely incredible. I heard him strike up a conversation with a university student. It wasn’t a conversation of a 10-year-old talking to a university student. It was a conversation of equals.”

“When you see a young man achieving so much at 10 years old, OK, there is hope for us,”

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Southeastern competition was held in Orlando. The institute's headquarters are in New York

Davis, who has tinkered with robots since the age of five, said he wasn’t nervous at all but found the experience exciting.

“When I explained to them how old I was, what grade I was in and that I did have a robot, I think they were afraid of me,” he added.

“I’m just learning what my dad and brother taught me, and I’m applying it to my work,” Davis said. “So far, it’s been working out.”

He built his winning ‘davibot’ in a week, starting with an m3pi as the base and adding an Arduino, an Italian microcomputer that tells the base unit which direction to move in - contest rules say robots must be completely autonomous.

He then designed components for measuring contest specifics: voltage, capacitance, temperature and waveform.

Davis attends Tennessee Virtual Academy, an online school approved by the Tennessee legislature last year.

It allows parents to tailor the home-based curriculum, which turned out to be the critical loophole allowing him to qualify to compete.

‘I read over rules thoroughly,’ said Davis’ father, Robert Fortenbrry, senior vice president of technical services at Cook Systems.

‘I could not find anywhere that there was any age limit at all. The requirement was that they have to be an IEEE member.’

Student IEEE membership requires a focus on engineering and computer programming. ‘They assume that is going to be at the university level,’ Fortenberry said.

Their older son, Madison, 19 and a senior at the University of West Florida, also competed as a high school student because he was enrolled in college courses.

Madison had planned to also compete in March. When he got sick the day of the competition, Davis ran his brother’s robot team, plus his own.