Commanding the robotics ring

FIRST LEGO LEAGUE

Commanding the robotics ring

Students innovate, collaborate for real-life challenges

For nine Charles City Middle School students, finding the perfect project for this weekend’s First Lego League competition took a lot of thinking, brainstorming and whiteboard use –– like, a lot of whiteboard use, student Emily Woodard said. Her partners on team Control- Alt-Defeat nodded, agreeing emphatically in advisor Jesse White’s Robotics classroom.

They’ve probably put a lot more thought into designing dumpsters than anyone else at school. Their dumpster prototype –– perhaps the first “smartdumpster” ever built in Charles City –– is designed to separate metals that can be reused from trash thrown in, with the help of a conveyor belt and powerful magnet.

“Right now landfills are actually digging out old landfills to find metals, because it gives them money and it’s stuff they can reuse,” Woodard said, showing off the scaled wooden prototype. “This will simplify the process and keep it separated.”

The project is only one of three competitions the team will face as they meet with judges in Waterloo on Saturday. This year’s theme, “Trash Trek”, asked students to conceptualize and build something useful to real-world issues, White said, but the team will also compete with a programmed Lego Mindstorms robot to complete tasks on a board map.

“They had to build a robot, then they had to program it to do certain missions. They have two and a half minutes to run through as many of those missions as they can,” White said.

The team –– made up of sixth, seventh, and eighth graders –– will score points for each completed mission, but if the robot messes up, they’ll be docked points, he added.

“It’s just crazy. You have kids from all over the region, they’ve spent lots of time putting this stuff together,” White said.

It took a few weeks for the students to plan out their project design after they visited Wilken & Sons Auto Salvage in Nashua for some real-life inspiration. The team had to learn to prioritize the machine’s functions, Woodard said.

“At first our idea of a dumpster was way complex. it had different things going in different areas, different components moving, the magnet going across –– it was very complicated,” Woodard said. “What do we actually need it to do? What’s something that takes care of one problem, instead of solving them all at once? So we came up with that after doodling on the whiteboard.”

They had some encouragement from the professionals, too, White said –– Cambrex employees who volunteered about once a week, helping students troubleshoot where there was issues.

“They’d say ‘hey, what if you try this.’ One would look at it and say, ‘that looks good, but maybe we should simplify it,’” White said.

It’s not just the dumpster concept that’s environmentally friendly now, Woodard said.

“Since we’re going to get a new middle school, this stuff that we’re using (to build) now would have been thrown away or just discarded. It does kind of have a recycling aspect to it too, so that’s good,” Woodard said.

After competing with both their Lego robot and project prototype, students will meet with a third judge to discuss what First Lego League calls their Core Values –– values including friendly competition, teamwork, experience and discovery. The extracurricular group also opens up new friendships among teammates, White said.

“Some of them build their friendships because they spend lots of time together,” White said, recalling past students’ experiences. “‘I met some new friends, and I learned how to work as a team, and I learned more information about,’ you know, whatever the theme of that year was.”

Two days before this year’s efforts debut, there were still a few kinks to work out.

“Trial and error is the big thing,” one teammate muses as the Mindstorm vehicle misses it’s target on a table map. But White only sees the progress among his students.

“I’m kind of hoping it builds…once they get into eighth grade, (that) they kind of build more onto the engineering aspect of it. It’s just a lot of fun,” he added. “It’s fun to watch them, and fun to watch them learn new things and just get in and start to build stuff.”

By Kate Hayden khayden@charlescitypress.com