LBCC Electricity Department Head Scott Fraser teaches the coolest class ever

ILLUSTRATION by ALICE RUTHERFORD

Scott Fraser never planned to be a teacher—let alone end up teaching inside the same classroom where he sat more than 30 years ago.

After completing Long Beach City College’s electrical program in 1977, Fraser spent most of the ’80s and ’90s tinkering away at robotics and other automation projects as an electrical engineer (really, who doesn’t?) until 1998, when a former teacher contacted him about joining the Electronics/Electricity Department faculty at LBCC.“

It was one of those things that I couldn’t pass up,” Fraser says. In 2001, he ambitiously began rebuilding (pun intended) the school’s defunct robotics program, and in 2003 Fraser introduced underwater robotics into his classroom. From there, he says he’s watched the “upward slope of the Electronics Department’s reputation.”

Since underwater robotics encompasses many aspects of the engineering curriculum, Fraser felt it would be the perfect way to expand his students’ electrical knowledge.

“You name it, it is in there,” Fraser says of underwater robots, which are surprisingly practical and used by archaeologists and oil tycoons alike.

For the last four years, Fraser has taken his lesson plans one step further with the formation of the Long Beach City College Electrical Department Remotely Operated Vehicle Team. With the Viking Explorers, as they’re called (the school’s nickname is the Vikings), he spends the year designing a fully-functional camera-equipped underwater robot to enter in the MATE International ROV competition, an annual contest held in a different city each June. (MATE, a company that helps train students for ocean-related jobs, is the contest’s sponsor.)

At the competition, remote-controlled underwater robots built by high schools and universities around the world are operated in three drastically different water tanks to test their abilities in varied oceanic environments. In addition to testing a robot’s ability withstand extreme hot and cold, the MATE Website lists restrictions as to the robot’s weight, power usage, and number of video monitors.

If this all sounds complicated, it is. Get a load of the technical jargon and the list of robot ingredients, which include “shaft scales,” “thrusters,” “PIC18F4431 Processors,” and “Solenoids.” It’s like a Balderdash game waiting to happen. Additionally, the electrical blueprints might as well be a flowchart of government authority; while the control center, with three screens and an Advantage joystick, could easily be a gamer’s home setup (pwn3d!).

Last year, the 11-person team (including three girls and a guy whose graduation date is listed on the Viking Explorer Website as “maybe 2017”) attended the competition in Houston at the NASA Neutral Buoyancy Lab, a trip that helped Fraser understand the capacity of his influence.

“What a charge it is to see my students competing with their robot, and in my same line of sight there’s the space-shuttle launch pad,” Fraser says. “I’m having so much fun watching them succeed.”

This year, Fraser and his self-funded team flew to Newfoundland with their pride and joy, Ormhildur (loose Norse translation: female battle serpent), and submerged and remote-controlled her to a finish ahead of any US school (take that, MIT and Texas A&M!).

With a ridiculously near-perfect hiring rate, the Electronics/Electricity Department, which Fraser heads, has produced graduates who have become everything from residential electricians to merchant seaman in the Gulf of Mexico.“

Basically, anyone who completes the program that wants to work will have multiple job offers to choose from,” Fraser says.

When he’s not teaching future moneymakers about robot guts, Fraser likes to work on his 1960 VW Double Cab pickup truck (he saved it from a field near Mt. Shasta nine years ago), which doubles as a tote for his motorcycle (a Harley, of course) and SCUBA gear (he just got certified).Does he ever second-guess teaching at a community college?“

I had a former student come in the other day and tell me that he and his wife wanted to thank me because with the money that he makes, she can afford to stay at home with their baby,” Fraser says, slightly choking up. “How can you argue with results like that?”

Tags: electrical engineering, Long Beach, long beach city college, robots