Zuzanna Sitek (narrating): They come wearing uniforms, and they do team chants in a huddle. It might sound like a sports match, but these kids are here to talk hydrodynamics and to run robots they’ve programmed to carry out different missions.
Richard Cassidy: So in First Lego League, teams design, build, and program autonomous Lego Mindstorms robots to compete in a robot game. And then they also do a scientific research project. And then at tournaments, they compete in the robot game, and they are interviewed by judges about their research project and their robot design process and that sort of thing.
Sitek (narrating): That’s Richard Cassidy. He’s the tournament director for the First Lego League Razorback Invitational. He’s also a professor of industrial engineering at the University of Arkansas.
Cassidy: And so this year’s theme is hydrodynamics. So all the projects that you’ll see this year have something to do with the human water cycle.
Sitek (narrating): Seventy-two teams descended on Fayetteville this past weekend. Cassidy says they came from 28 states and 10 countries, some as far away as Australia and Japan.
All the teams went through an initial round of judging Friday. There were three different categories of judging: there’s the project, there’s the robot design process, and then there’s what we call core values, which is essentially teamwork and cooperation and that sort of thing.
Cassidy: Last night, the judges narrowed each of those categories from 72 to 36, and they’re being re-interviewed this morning.
Sitek (narrating): One of the teams that got a callback was Team Gryffindor. We followed them through Saturday’s round of interviews.
Sitek (to students): So I guess you guys are into Harry Potter?
Team Gryffindor (laughing): Yes, we are. Just a bit.
Sitek (narrating): Team Gryffindor was one of three all-girl teams at the tournament.
Anika Puri: I’m Anika Puri. I’m 13 years old.
Anvi Dada: Hi, I’m Anvi Dada.
Sitek: And are you 13?
Anvi: Yes, I’m also 13.
Khushi Goyle: My name is Khushi Goyle, and I’m 11.
Riona Dada: My name is Riona Dada, and I am 10.
Sitek (narrating): The team hails from Chappaqua, New York.
Anika: It’s much more than just about winning. You learn about presentation skills, how to talk in front of judges, how to answer questions. And also you learn so many cool things in robot, and I never imagined that a robot could actually complete so many missions, and we’d actually be able to build that robot and program it.
Sitek (narrating): After she and her team wrapped up two interviews with judges that morning, they started with the project portion. The team went into one of the judging rooms to give their presentation. The girls each carry a piece of their project and work together to set it up in front of the panel of judges. Then they get started.
Scripted presentation begins:
Team Gryffindor Member: Oh no!
Another Member: What happened?
First Member: I have been vomiting, severe abdominal pain, diarrhea, and I seem to have lost my appetite.
Another Member: These symptoms seem to be that you have some sort of a stomach infection. When did these symptoms start?
First Member: Well, I think I should drink some water fountain at school.
Another Member: You might have drank some contaminated water. If so, you’re not alone. In fact, 63 million people in the US are exposed to unsafe drinking water.
Sitek (narrating): That’s because Team Gryffindor says good water testing systems depend on continuous detection, timeliness, proximity to the point of consumption, and coverage. And most current water testing systems don’t meet any of those standards.
Team Member: All of this wouldn’t be a problem if everybody just used Aqua2U.
Judge: Huh. What’s that?
Team Member: Aqua2U is a device which continuously tests your water for contaminants. It uses a digital microscope attached to a camera as well as the Raspberry Pi. It also uses visual recognition software.
Sitek (narrating): Raspberry Pi, by the way, is a tiny programmable computer. And Watson is a type of artificial intelligence software. Team Gryffindor is using its visual recognition capabilities to ID water contaminants.
Team Member: And we’ve also done a lot of microscope testing. This was a picture that we took with these microscopes. And as you can see, you can clearly see that this is a Giardia. And so it would be very easy for Watson to identify. We’ve actually done a lot of testing with it. So at first, Watson wasn’t able to identify most of them—it was able to identify those microorganisms. So we went on and did some custom model training where we were able to increase the accuracy and the confidence by a great amount.
Judge: Nice. Nice.
Sitek (narrating): After taking questions from the judges, Anika, Anvi, Khushi, and Riona have to switch gears to get ready for their robot presentation. Again, they go before a panel of judges.
Team Gryffindor: Hi and welcome to our robot presentation. Our robot’s name is Hermione Granger, which comes from our team name, Gryffindor.
Sitek (narrating): Team Gryffindor tells the judges they went into this season of competitions with a strategy. They wanted to build a robot that was maneuverable, sturdy, accurate, and consistent.
Team Member: We also use sensors to make more accurate turns. We created a mind block where we first started the robot turning fast, but then it slows down based on the sensor reading. We also used the gyro sensor to move straight. This increased the accuracy tremendously. We also performed many tests and calculations in order to calculate the standard deviation.
Sitek (narrating): Teams can attach a variety of sensors to their robots. In this case, Team Gryffindor used gyroscopic sensors to improve their robot’s navigation system.
The team also had a strategy for completing their robot missions. They looked for missions on the playing field that were close together, could be done with the same robot attachments, and came with high scores.
Team Member: We’ve now prepared a video for you to watch. All the videos are in slo-mo, so you can see in detail all of her missions as well as innovative attachments at work. So you will now see our robot leaving base for its first mission. You will see this attachment going down for the mission, and you will be seeing that this attachment actually moves. We were actually inspired by our own elbows. So using biomimicry, we made a detachment that does not get stuck onto the mission models.
Sitek (narrating): Here’s Richard Cassidy again to explain how the robot missions work.
Cassidy: Every year the game is a little bit different, but the tasks are pretty similar—picking things up and placing them in specified locations, knocking things over, flipping a lever, flipping a switch, spinning, rotating something. You know, all kind of basic movements, but every year the things that they do are different sizes, different positions on the playing field.
Sitek (narrating): This year, Team Gryffindor was able to score 225 points—their personal best. Later that afternoon, the girls will have to put their robot to the test once again. But for now, they take a break.
Anika: I feel like skills you learn here can help you if you want to be a politician because of speaking skills, if you want to be an engineer because of the programming, a doctor because of the project aspect. You can be so many different things with the skills that you learn here. I personally don’t really know what I want to be when I grow up, but I definitely want to keep all the skills that I’ve learned.
Khushi: I think since right now I’m just a sixth grader, I’m like, I don’t have to really—I don’t think I should need to worry about that right now.
Sitek (narrating): Team Gryffindor started working on their project and robot in September. Anvi says they met every week on Sundays, sometimes more often as competitions got underway.
Anvi: We try to meet twice a week, and we also meet—like now, it’s all on the phones, right? So we meet like on Google Hangouts, which is basically FaceTime.
Sitek (narrating): They also practiced their presentations so they’d be fluent in the subject and able to project confidence in front of the judges.
Riona: It’s her first year on the team.
Riona: Doing FLL gave me like a lot of confidence. Before, I could not speak to anybody. Like just at the beginning of the season, I would not be able to do this at all.
Sitek (narrating): Riona also explains how Team Gryffindor came up with Aqua2U.
Riona: We all thought about ideas—like before researching our ideas, we wrote them down on a post-it. We wrote all of our ideas down on post-its, and then we put them on a wall. We didn’t put our name on them so nobody would know. And then we looked at all the post-its and then considered which ones would be a good idea.
Anvi: We were very surprised because it’s a first-world country. We didn’t think that water contamination was that big of a problem here. But if it’s that big of a problem here, think about the entire world where there are underdeveloped countries. So that’s a problem that we wanted to help and help out everyone in the world.
Sitek (narrating): And Team Gryffindor agrees—it’s nice to see more girls working to solve the world’s problems and programming robots. Anvi and Anika weigh in.
Anvi: I feel like girls in the past have been like, “Oh, that’s for boys.” But it’s not. It’s for everyone. And I want kids all over—not only in Arkansas, for kids all over, for all over the country—
Anika: —well-known country, world—to join in, because I think it’s going to help us with the future. And we are the next generation, right?
Anvi: And in addition to that, any girls who are listening to this—don’t get intimidated by the boys, because they can do as much work on robotics as well as project, and as good as the boys.
Sitek (narrating): And congratulations is also in order for Team Gryffindor. The girls walked away with a second-place Champion’s Award after this weekend’s tournament.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue.
