Robots line the shelves of Heidi Lent’s classroom in Warrenton.

A recent graduate of a northeast Oregon high school put his engineering and computer science skills to a real-life test this summer, using a remotely operated vehicle to see inside an Astoria city dam.

Jeff Harrington, Astoria’s public works director, gave a presentation at a city council work session in August about inspection and maintenance of the city’s three dams, which are located just east of Astoria. When inspecting one dam, however, the city and its contractor, Jacobs Solutions, ran into a problem: the dam’s interior could only be accessed by a narrow 48-inch outlet.

The engineers were stumped when Harrington happened to run into an old friend: Heidi Lent, a teacher and robotics coach in Warrenton, who offered him an unusual solution. She had a star student, Dwayne Wallace, who could guide a robot with an attached camera down the narrow chute.

Harrington told the city council he thought the proposal was a bit “pie in the sky,” but sure enough, Wallace showed up a few days later equipped with a sleek, blue, professionally manufactured, remotely operated vehicle. The robot connected to Wallace’s laptop, so he could steer it while also viewing the video footage.

“It was pretty interesting seeing everything (in the dam),” Wallace said. “For a lot of the people working there, it was their first time seeing some of the components down there.”

Wallace, who graduated from Warrenton High School, has been interested in robotics and engineering for as long as he can remember. With encouragement from Lent, he joined the high school’s underwater robotics team, The Rays, building his own remotely operated vehicles and competing nationally and internationally.

“(Lent) saw my strengths and invited me to join the robotics team,” Wallace said. “It all started there. I’ve always been interested in robotics and engineering and all that, so it gave me an outlet to learn and experiment with things.”

For those competitions, students design robots to complete tasks aligned with real-world themes and challenges, such as ocean data collection and underwater habitat restoration. They are also required to present marketing plans for the robots and answer technical questions from engineers. Last year, the team traveled to Tennessee for the world championships. In 2025, they plan to head to Alpena, Michigan.

These events are great learning experiences for the students, Lent said, and an outlet for healthy competition. However, she also hopes that students can put their skills to use for the benefit of the community locally.

“The outreach piece is, we want to be able to work with real-life opportunities for these kids to use their skills and see how they’re used in the real world for our community,” Lent said.

Lent said she is always on the lookout for other opportunities to employ the students and their robots. In exchange for their skills, she hopes that the community will give back to the robotics program and help them return to world championships each year.

“I would have taken five or six kids up to that project, so they could see how engineers act, so they could see the type of real-world things that Astoria city has to do, and open their eyes to why we design these things,” she said. “And there’s so many jobs around it.”

For Wallace, who is pursuing computer and electrical engineering at Linn-Benton Community College, helping inspect the city’s dam alongside professional engineers offered a window into a potential future path.

“Just trying to get a career in engineering is my main goal right now,” he said.