School Competes in Its First-Ever LEGO Robotics Competition
Introduced to the Middle School two years ago, and to the Upper School a year later, the LEGO Robotics program is moving into a new phase, and the result is a semester of firsts! The first-ever Middle and Lower School robotics team will participate in the annual FIRST LEGO League Challenge this Saturday, November 9, and there are plans for an Upper School team to enter the FIRST Robotics Competition for high school students early next year.
“Anything we can do to get students’ minds going and thinking outside the box” is important, says Kathy Foy, the Upper School physics teacher who is also guiding the Lower and Middle School Robotics Club. “What better place to do this than Principia, where we all share the sense of infinite ideas being available!”
But first things first . . . here’s a bit of background on this weekend’s competition:
- FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) is a nonprofit organization established in 1989 by entrepreneur and inventor Dean Kamen, who is widely known for designing the Segway as well as a wheelchair that can maneuver up and down stairs, among his 440 patents.
- FIRST LEGO League (FLL) is a robotics program designed to get 9- to 16-year-olds excited about science and technology and teach them a range of skills. The highlight is an annual challenge, for which teams problem solve, undertake research to help avert or address the specified challenge, and build, design, and program a robot that can complete 12 tasks in two minutes.
Each FLL Challenge has three parts—a robot game, a project, and the FLL core values. This year’s challenge topic or theme is Nature’s Fury. (Previous years’ themes included Nano Quest, Power Puzzle, Ocean Odyssey, and Mission Mars.)
For the robot game, teams practice and compete on the same “playing field,” which, this year, consists of a mini-city, including an airport, park, and buildings. Using identical LEGO kits, the teams program their robot to move around the 4- by 8-foot playing field, bringing people, animals, and equipment to safety in a two-minute period.
For their project on Nature’s Fury, Principia’s team chose to address flooding, based on the environment and weather patterns in Missouri. With support from Foy and John Tamm-Buckle, one of the School’s academic technology facilitators, they put together a kit that can be used for such emergencies, which includes a "Be Prepared" manual and a hand-cranked flashlight for use during power outages.
On a trial run a few weeks ago, Principia’s Robopaws robot did a pretty good job getting people and pets into the safety zone and also moving vehicles out of the way. But it ran into a little trouble with timing on the landing of an airplane.
“We need to reprogram,” murmured eighth grader Noah. “No, we don’t,” disagreed his buddy Matthew.
“We just need to place it in a different starting position,” interjected fifth-grader Gavin.
After some fine-tuning and adjustments, they were ready to try again. And again. And again . . . while their teammates consulted the FLL manual and a stopwatch to calculate points earned.
This process ties in directly to the third part of the annual FLL challenge—the core values, which include teamwork, the primacy of discovery over winning, and what FLL calls Coopertition® and Gracious Professionalism®. According to FLL’s website, “Coopertition® produces innovation. . . . [It] is founded on the concept and a philosophy that teams can and should help and cooperate with each other even as they compete.”
With Gracious Professionalism®, a term coined by Dr. Woodie Flowers, professor emeritus at MIT and FIRST’s National Advisor, “fierce competition and mutual gain are not separate notions,” the FLL website explains. “Gracious professionals learn and compete like crazy, but treat one another with respect and kindness in the process. . . . No chest-thumping tough talk, but no sticky-sweet platitudes either.”
For Foy, this is one of her students’ strong suits. “Principia needs to be recognized for the wonderful students we have, who already display a sense of ‘gracious professionalism,’” she comments.
This video shows Robopaws on a successful practice run!