The Georgia Institute of Technology opened its doors to more than 400 middle school and high school students on Wednesday for the third annual Robotics Open House. Georgia Tech masters students and Ph.D. candidates demonstrated more than 20 projects around campus, marking the Institute’s participation in National Robotics Week.

Students saw a variety of projects, including an autonomous race car, robotic submarines and Simon (click here for a video of the day’s events).

“You can see the students’ eyes light up when they’re watching our demos. They get really excited because they often have little knowledge that such projects exist, and they are in many cases not aware of the potential impact of new technology,” said Henrik Christensen, director of the Center for Robotics and Intelligent Machines. “That’s important because some of them arrive and think engineering is not very exciting. Then they see some of our robots and go back to school to tell others. We hope today inspires them.”

National Robotics Week was established by Congress in 2010. There are 150 events across all 50 states this year, the highest participation to date. National Robotics Week is intended to be a “national road-map” for robotics technology.