GoKawiilTom Burick has always considered himself a builder. Over the years he’s designed robots, constructed a vintage teardrop trailer, and most recently, led a group of students in building a full-scale replica of a pivotal 1940s computer.
Burick is a technology instructor at PS Academy in Gilbert, Ariz., a middle and high school for students with autism and other specialized learning needs. At the start of the 2025–26 school year, he began a project with his students to build a full-scale replica of the Electronic Numerical 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 one thousand times as fast as 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 the business, he turned to teaching. “I had so many amazing people help 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 need to pay that forward.”
Becoming a Roboticist
As a young child in Latrobe, Pa., Burick watched the television show Lost in Space, which 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 to myself, I want that in my life. And that started that lifelong love affair with robotics and technology.”
He started building toy robots out of anything he could find, and in junior high school, he began adding electronics. “By early high school, I was building full-fledged autonomous, microprocessor-controlled machines,” he says. At age 15, he built a 150-pound steel firefighting robot, for which he won awards from IEEE and other organizations.
Burick kept building robots and reached out for help from local colleges and universities. He first got in touch with a student at Carnegie Mellon University, who invited him to visit campus. “My parents drove me down the next weekend, and he gave me a tour of the robotics lab. I was mesmerized. He sent me home with college textbooks and piles of metal and gears and wires,” Burick says. He would read the textbook a page at a time, reading it again and again until he felt he had an understanding of it. Then, to help fill gaps in his understanding, he got in touch with a robotics instructor at Saint Vincent College, in his hometown of Latrobe, who let him sit in on classes. Each of these adults, he says, “helped change the trajectory of my life.”
Toward the end of high school, Burick realized that college wouldn’t be the right environment for him. “I was drawn to real-world problem-solving rather than structured coursework and I chose to continue along that path,” he says. Additionally, Burick has dyscalculia, which makes traditional mathematics more challenging for him. “It pushed me to develop alternative methods of engineering.”
The ENIAC replica Burick’s students built precisely matches what the original computer would have looked like before it was disassembled in the 1950s. Robert Gamboa
When he graduated, he worked in several tech jobs 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 standard, off-the-shelf components, and realized there was no comparable product for robotics.
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