How This Former Roboticist’s Students Rebuilt ENIAC

Tom Burick has always considered himself a builder. Over the years, he has designed robots, built a vintage teardrop trailer and, most recently, led a group of students in building a life-size replica of a crucial computer from the 1940s.

Burick is a technology instructor at PS Academy in Gilbert, Arizona, a middle and high school for students with autism and other specialized learning needs. At the start of the 2025-2026 school year, he began a project with his students to build a full-scale replica of the Electronic Digital Integrator and Computer, or ENIAC, for the 80th anniversary of the historic computer’s construction. ENIAC was one of the world’s first programmable electronic computers. When it was built, it was about a thousand times faster than other machines.

Before becoming a teacher, Burick owned a robotics company for a decade in the 2000s. But when a financial downturn forced him to close his business, he turned to teaching. “So many amazing people helped me when I was young [who] really gave me their time and resources, and really changed the trajectory of my life,” Burick says. “I thought I had to pay it forward.”

Become a roboticist

As a young child in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, Burick watched the television show Lost in spacewhich includes a robot character who protects the family. “He was the young boy’s best friend and I was so captivated by that. I remember thinking: I want this in my life. And so began this lifelong love affair with robotics and technology.”

He began building toy robots from whatever he could find, and in college he began adding electronics. “Early in high school, I was building fully autonomous, microprocessor-controlled machines,” he says. At age 15, he built a 150-pound steel firefighting robot, for which he won awards from the IEEE and other organizations.

Burick continued to build robots and sought help from local colleges and universities. He first made contact with a student at Carnegie Mellon University, who invited him to visit the campus. “My parents drove me the next weekend and he showed me around the robotics lab. I was fascinated. He sent me home with college textbooks and piles of metal and gears and wires,” Burick said. He read the manual page by page, reading it over and over again until he felt he understood it. Then, to fill in the gaps, he contacted a robotics instructor at Saint Vincent College in his hometown of Latrobe, who let him attend classes. Each of these adults, he says, “helped change the trajectory of my life.”

Toward the end of high school, Burick realized that college would not be the right environment for him. “I was drawn to solving real-world problems rather than structured courses and chose to continue down that path,” he says. Additionally, Burick suffers from dyscalculia, which makes traditional math more difficult for him. “This pushed me to develop alternative engineering methods.”

The ENIAC replica built by Burick’s students is precisely what the original computer would have looked like before it was dismantled in the 1950s. Robert Gamboa

After graduating, he worked several jobs in the technology sector before starting his own company. In 2000, he opened a computer retail store and adjacent robotics business, White Box Robotics. The idea for the company came when Burick was building a “white box” PC from off-the-shelf, off-the-shelf components and realized there was no comparable product for robotics.

So he began developing a general-purpose modular platform that applied white-box PC standards to mobile robots. “The robot’s chassis looked like a box of Legos,” he says. You can assemble two torsos to double its payload, turn off the drive system, or swap its head for another set of sensors. It filed utility and design patents for the platform, called 914 PC-Bot, and after merging with a Canadian defense robotics company called Frontline Robotics, it began production. They have sold about 200 robots in 17 countries, Burick says.

Then the financial crisis of 2008 hit. White Box Robotics held on for a few years, before closing its doors at the end of 2010. “I was able to live my life’s dream for 10 years,” he says. After White Box closed, “there was some soul-searching” about what to do next. He recalled the impact his own mentors had had and decided to pay it forward by teaching.

Neurodiversity as a superpower

In 2013, Burick began working in a job training program for young adults with autism. The program didn’t have a tech component, so he started one and ran it until 2019, when he was hired as a tech instructor at PS Academy Arizona.

Burick and one of his students assembled the basis of one of ENIAC’s three portable function tables, which contained banks of switches storing numerical constants. Bri Mason

Burick feels he can connect with his students because he is also neurodivergent. Throughout his childhood, he was told what he couldn’t do due to his diagnosis of dyscalculia. “People tell you what it takes, but they never tell you what it does,” Burick says.

As an adult, he realized that some of his strengths were also linked to dyscalculia, such as powerful 3D spatial reasoning. “I have this CAD program running in my head 24 hours a day,” he says. “I think the reason I was successful in robotics was really because of dyscalculia… For me, [it] has always been a superpower.

Every time his students say something derogatory about living with autism, he shares his own experience. “Maybe you have to be a little more tenacious than others, because there are things you have to overcome, but you come out with gifts and strengths,” he tells them.

And Burick’s classes aim to exploit those strengths. “I didn’t want my technology program to feel like DIY hour,” he says. Instead, through projects like the ENIAC Replica, students can take advantage of characteristics many of them share, like the ability to hyperfocus and precisely repeat tasks.

Recreate ENIAC

Burick has been teaching ENIAC to his students for several years. Reading that article, he learned that the massive 27-ton computer had been dismantled and partially destroyed after being decommissioned in 1955. Although some of ENIAC’s 40 original panels were on display in museums, “there was no hope of ever seeing it back together. We wanted to give the world that experience,” Burick says.

He and his students first learned about ENIAC, and even Burick was surprised by the complexity of the 80-year-old computer. They built an 11/12 scale model to help students better understand what it looked like. Seeing the students light up, Burick became confident in their ability to graduate to the full-size model and he began ordering supplies.

ENIAC was comprised of 40 large metal panels arranged in a U shape that housed its numerous vacuum tubes, resistors, capacitors and switches. Twenty of the panels were accumulators with the same design. So students started with these and then worked on groups of smaller panels. The repeating panels brought symmetry to ENIAC, Burick says, but it was also one of the main challenges of recreating it. If one part was out of place, the next part would be out of place and the error would compound.

Here, the students installed 500 simulated vacuum tubes in each of the panels, for a total of 18,000 vacuum tubes.Robert Gamboa

Once the panels were built, they added ENIAC’s three function tables, which stored the digital constants in banks of switches and then in two punch card machines. Finally, they installed 18,000 simulated vacuum tubes. In total, the project used nearly 300 square yards of heavy cardboard, 1,600 hot glue gun sticks and 7 gallons of black paint.

The scale of the machine and the work of his students left Burick impressed. “Once we finished, I felt like I was in a room full of scientists,” he says.

Previously, Burick’s students built an 8-foot-long Tesla Cybertruck (“complete with a 400-watt stereo system and subwoofer”) and he plans to follow that up with another recreation, perhaps the Apollo moon missions.

“I go to work every day and feel passionate about robotics [and] technology. I get to share that passion with students,” Burick says. “I get to feel what it’s like to be in the shoes of the people who helped me. It completes that circle and I find it really rewarding.