FORT HUACHUCA — The future of the nation’s engineering rests on young people, not “the old farts,” said Kevin Peterson, the president of the Cochise Chapter of the Association of Old Crows.

It will be the young people now in high school or entering college “who will be building the future,” he said Thursday.

It was at a luncheon meeting of the Old Crows, an organization founded in the 1960s to keep American ahead in the electronic engineering arena during the height of the Cold War, that three $1,000 scholarships were presented to this year’s Buena High School graduates.

Usually, the chapter only presents one $1,000 scholarship, which is good for yearly renewals up to four years if a person maintains good grades in an engineering field.

The winners were so close and had excellent letters of recommendation that they were the top of the 27 who applied for the award.

Calling them this year’s “A team,” because all their first names start with the beginning letter of the alphabet, Lee Isle, the chapter’s scholarship chairman, said each deserved the scholarships.

Provided the scholarships were:

• Andrea Miller, who will be attending Stanford University to study either aeronautical or electrical engineering.

• Arman Reyes, who will be going to the University of Arizona to earn a degree in computer science management.

• Aaron Sindelar, who has been accepted at Northern Arizona University where he will pursue a double engineering degree.

It is the thinkers of the world, many of them engineers, who help move society, Peterson said.

It was the Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer and inventor Archimedes who solved a problem of water displacement by shouting “eureka,” meaning “I have found it,” jumped out of his bath and ran naked through the streets of Syracuse more than 2,200 years ago proclaiming his success, Peterson said.

It’s that type of thinker who brings innovation to the human race and with it makes life better, he said.

Sometimes simple solutions are found just to answer an easy problem in life, Peterson said, relating that in the 1950s young people were playing baseball but were constantly breaking windows, to the distress of homeowners, when one member of the team decided to use a plastic tennis ball and a broom handle to play the game so property damage would be limited.

Watching was the boy’s father and with some redesign, the wiffleball was created, Peterson said.

The challenge to the young people of the country to find solutions and that means taking up for the older generation, which like most older generations are passing, he said.

He then pointed to a small group of Buena High School students, nerds all, who work hard to find solutions to problems presented to them as members of the Buena High School Nifty Engineering Robotics Design Squad.

One of the robotics team members, Kevin Forbes, told the audience about the group’s success in the past three years and the challenges they have faced and met, including designing an underwater robot for contests. The squad receives most of its technical support from the fort’s Intelligence Electronic Warfare Test Directorate.

Peterson said it is the N.E.R.D.S. and students like Miller, Sindelar and Reyes, who work together, which is the goal of all professional engineers. Miller was a member of the N.E.R.D.S.

Eventually all the students in the room will go off to college where innovation, teamwork and synergy will be important, he said.

“We old farts, the gray beards and gray-haired are waiting,” Peterson said.