Tom Burick has at all times thought of himself a builder. Through the years he’s designed robots, constructed a vintage teardrop trailer, and most lately, led a gaggle of scholars in constructing a full-scale duplicate of a pivotal Nineteen Forties laptop.
Burick is a expertise teacher at PS Academy in Gilbert, Ariz., a center and highschool for college students with autism and different specialised studying wants. Firstly of the 2025–26 faculty yr, he started a mission along with his college students to construct a full-scale duplicate of the Digital Numerical Integrator and Laptop, or ENIAC, for the 80th anniversary of the historic computer’s construction. ENIAC was one of many world’s first programmable digital computer systems. When it was constructed, it was about one thousand occasions as quick as different machines.
Earlier than turning into a instructor, Burick owned a robotics firm for a decade within the 2000s. However when a monetary downturn compelled him to shut the enterprise, he turned to instructing. “I had so many wonderful individuals assist me after I was younger [who] actually gave me their time and sources, and actually modified the trajectory of my life,” Burick says. “I assumed I have to pay that ahead.”
Changing into a Roboticist
As a younger youngster in Latrobe, Pa., Burick watched the tv present Misplaced in House, which features a robotic character who protects the household. “He was the younger boy’s greatest pal, and I used to be so captivated by that. I bear in mind pondering to myself, I would like that in my life. And that began that lifelong love affair with robotics and expertise.”
He began constructing toy robots out of something he might discover, and in junior highschool, he started including electronics. “By early highschool, I used to be constructing full-fledged autonomous, microprocessor-controlled machines,” he says. At age 15, he constructed a 150-pound metal firefighting robot, for which he received awards from IEEE and different organizations.
Burick stored constructing robots and reached out for assist from native faculties and universities. He first acquired in contact with a scholar at Carnegie Mellon University, who invited him to go to campus. “My dad and mom drove me down the following weekend, and he gave me a tour of the robotics lab. I used to be mesmerized. He despatched me house with faculty textbooks and piles of steel and gears and wires,” Burick says. He would learn the textbook a web page at a time, studying it many times till he felt he had an understanding of it. Then, to assist fill gaps in his understanding, he acquired in contact with a robotics teacher at Saint Vincent College, in his hometown of Latrobe, who let him sit in on courses. Every of those adults, he says, “helped change the trajectory of my life.”
Towards the tip of highschool, Burick realized that faculty wouldn’t be the proper atmosphere for him. “I used to be drawn to real-world problem-solving reasonably than structured coursework and I selected to proceed alongside that path,” he says. Moreover, Burick has dyscalculia, which makes conventional arithmetic tougher for him. “It pushed me to develop various strategies of engineering.”
The ENIAC duplicate Burick’s college students constructed exactly matches what the unique laptop would have regarded like earlier than it was disassembled within the Fifties. Robert Gamboa
When he graduated, he labored in a number of tech jobs earlier than beginning his personal firm. In 2000, he opened a pc retail retailer and adjoining robotics enterprise, White Field Robotics. The concept for the corporate got here when Burick was constructing a “white field” PC from commonplace, off-the-shelf elements, and realized there was no comparable product for robotics.
So, he began growing a modular, general-purpose platform that utilized white field PC requirements to mobile robots. “The robotic’s chassis was like a field of Legos,” he says. You may click on collectively two torsos to double its payload, change out the drive system, or swap its head for a unique set of sensors. He filed utility and design patents for the platform, referred to as the 914 PC-Bot, and after merging with a Canadian protection robotics firm referred to as Frontline Robotics, began manufacturing. They bought about 200 robots in 17 nations, Burick says.
Then the 2008 monetary disaster hit. White Field Robotics held on for a few years, shuttering in late 2010. “I acquired to reside my life’s dream for 10 years,” he says. After closing White Field, “there was some soul looking out” about what to do subsequent. He recalled the affect his personal mentors had, and determined to pay it ahead by instructing.
Neurodiversity as a Superpower
In 2013, Burick began working in a vocational coaching program for younger adults residing with autism. This system didn’t have a technical arm, so he began one and ran it till 2019, when he was employed to be a expertise teacher at PS Academy Arizona.
Burick and one among his college students assemble the bottom for one among ENIAC’s three transportable perform tables, which contained banks of switches that saved numerical constants. Bri Mason
Burick feels he can join along with his college students, as a result of he’s additionally neurodivergent. All through his childhood, he was instructed what he wasn’t in a position to do due to his dyscalculia prognosis. “Folks inform you what it takes, however they by no means inform you what it offers,” Burick says.
In maturity, he realized that a few of his strengths are linked to dyscalculia, too, like sturdy 3D spatial reasoning. “I’ve this CAD program that runs in my head 24 hours a day,” he says. “I believe the explanation I used to be profitable in robotics, actually, was due to the dyscalculia…. To me, [it] has at all times been a superpower.”
Every time his college students say one thing disparaging about residing with autism, he shares his personal expertise. “You’ll want to have perhaps only a bit extra tenacity than others, as a result of there are components of it you do must combat by, however you come by with items and strengths,” he tells them.
And Burick’s courses purpose to play to these strengths. “I didn’t need my expertise program to really feel like craft hour,” he says. As an alternative, by tasks just like the ENIAC duplicate, college students can leverage traits a lot of them share, like the skills to hyperfocus and to exactly repeat duties.
Recreating ENIAC
Burick has taught his college students about ENIAC for a number of years. Whereas studying about it, he realized that the large, 27-tonne laptop was dismantled and partially destroyed after being decommissioned in 1955. Though a number of of ENIAC’s 40 unique panels are on show at museums, “there was no hope of ever seeing it collectively once more. We needed to offer the world that have,” Burick says.
He and his college students began by studying about ENIAC, and even Burick was shocked by how advanced the 80-year-old laptop was. They constructed a one-twelfth scale mannequin to assist the scholars higher perceive what it regarded like. Seeing the scholars mild up, Burick grew to become assured of their skill to maneuver onto the full-scale mannequin, and he began ordering provides.
ENIAC was composed of 40 giant steel panels organized in a U-shape that housed its many vacuum tubes, resistors, capacitors, and switches. Twenty of the panels had been accumulators with the identical design, so the scholars began with these, then labored by smaller groupings of panels. The repeating panels introduced symmetry to ENIAC, Burick says, nevertheless it was additionally one of many foremost challenges of recreating it. If one half was barely misplaced, the following one could be too and the error would compound.
The scholars put in 500 simulated vacuum tubes in every of the panels right here, for a complete of 18,000 vacuum tubes.Robert Gamboa
As soon as they constructed the panels, they added ENIAC’s three perform tables, which saved numerical constants in banks of switches, then two punch-card machines. Lastly, they put in 18,000 simulated vacuum tubes. In complete, the mission used almost 300 sq. meters of thick-ream cardboard, 1,600 hot-glue-gun sticks, and seven gallons of black paint.
The size of the machine—and his college students’ work—left Burick in awe. “By the point we had been carried out, I felt like I used to be in a room filled with scientists,” he says.
Beforehand, Burick’s college students constructed an 8-foot-long drivable Tesla Cybertruck (“full with a 400-watt stereo system and a subwoofer”) and he plans to maintain the momentum with one other recreation—perhaps from the Apollo moon missions.
“I am going to work on daily basis, and I really feel obsessed with robotics [and] expertise. I get to share that zeal with the scholars,” Burick says. “I get to really feel what it’s prefer to be within the place of the those that helped me. It closes that loop, and I discover that actually rewarding.”
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