Rob Greene, who teaches automotive technology at John F. Kennedy High School through the Regional Occupation Program, received UC Davis’ C-STEM (Computing, Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) “Teacher of the Year” award at ceremony on Saturday.

Greene, who is in his third year teaching at Kennedy, also heads up the school’s robotics team, which achieved a top 10 finish in the recent FIRST Robotics Sacramento Regional Tournament at UC Davis. Of the 53 teams in the competition, Kennedy Robotics finished ninth. Kennedy’s team also won the event’s Industrial Safety award – all the students were First Aid, CPR and OSHA safety certified.

Greene volunteers hundreds of hours of his personal time helping students get ready for the FIRST tournament. He says he enjoys watching students become engrossed in the engineering required to build robots that perform certain specified tasks. This year, teams were required to build robots that could pick up inflatable rings and place them on 10-foot pegs. Robots could score more points by moving autonomously and deploying a mini-bot that would climb a 10-foot pole in less than 15 seconds.

“For a lot of these kids (on the team), they’ve never found anything at school that they wanted to run with,” Greene says. “So it’s great to see them go from zero to accomplishment through robotics.”

Greene received his award at the first annual C-STEM Day hosted by the UC Davis K-14 Outreach Center for Computing and STEM Education (C-STEM) and College of Engineering.