CTEST LABS Interviews Tom Atwood

CTEST LABS Interviews Tom Atwood on his Magazine Career Tom Atwood, Executive Director of the National Robotics Education Foundation, in late June was interviewed by Tracey and Cameron Hughes, founders of CTEST Laboratories, on his career in aviation and robotics magazine publishing. Since 1990, Tom has founded, co-founded and edited magazines and related websites covering radio control (RC) hobbies, full-scale aviation and robotics. The interview includes entertaining footage ranging from latest robot dogs and full-scale autonomous boats to historical footage of the MythBusters experimenting with RC models. It also delves into how the rising internet impacted the RC industry and special-interest print magazines Tom edited. Watch this easy-going personal retrospective on RC, Robotics and magazines here.

Our sincere thanks to Tracey and Cameron Hughes, founders of CTEST Laboratories and authors of multiple books on STEM-related robot programming, for orchestrating and producing this interview.  CTEST Laboratories is a non-profit facility dedicated to the applied research and development of epistemological software systems with a particular focus on environmental monitoring, robotics, and embedded knowledge inference devices.

NEOACM interviews Tom Atwood, founder of Robot magazine in late 2005. He designed, staffed and oversaw Robot magazine for 7+ years until resigning from Maplegate Media in 2014. Robot magazine covered RC robot platforms, and reported on hobby, educational, full scale military, space, medical and other robot types. This magazine was helpful to hobbyists, middle and high schools, as well as colleges that developed robotics programs. In the early 1990s, at Air Age Media, Tom helped revitalize Model Airplane News as Editor-in-Chief, and, in 1996, he co-founded Flight Journal magazine, which covers full-scale aviation adventure and aviation technology. In 1992, Tom received a Certificate of Appreciation from the Department of Defense, personally signed by then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, for orchestrating shipment of a tractor-trailer truckload of thousands of RC magazines to our armed forces serving in Desert Storm. In this interview, Tom, who holds a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of Arizona, and a J.D. from NYU Law School, discusses his several decade career of radio-controlled model and robotics publications and journalism including his current focus as the Executive Director of the National Robotics Education Foundation (NREF), a nonprofit that facilitates the growth of national robotics-based educational programs.