Six students from Northwest Arkansas are traveling to Korea to test a robot they built from LEGO bricks. They'll be competing against other teams from around the world. Jack Travis has more on Technobotics and the FIRST LEGO League.
In a few days, a group of students, their coaches and a fist-sized robot named Bill Frog will head out across the Pacific to Korea to compete on the world stage. They're participating in the FIRST LEGO League Korea Open International Invitational in Jeonju, South Korea.
FIRST LEGO League is an official program that enables kids to build and test their own creations against one another, while focusing on team-building skills. Dave and Jen Gandy coach the Iron Patriots Silver team. The roster includes students from Providence Academy in Rogers and two homeschooled students. Grades range from fourth to seventh, and they operate through an organization called Technobotics, which gathers students from across the area and forms teams that compete in different STEM robotics programs.
Coach Dave Gandy says he's been enthralled by robotics since he was these kids' age, but he had to wait until his undergrad to really engage with that passion.
"These kids are doing this as young as third grade. So here's what's so interesting. I got to go to MIT. One of the professors there, Professor Woodie Flowers, is one of the people that actually invented the first robotics competition, along with Dean Kamen and a few other folks. So he was one of my professors at school, and he figured out how they saw how great this robot competition was at MIT and figured out how to translate it even younger. And part of that is by allowing kids to use LEGOs — it allows them to focus less on the very low-level parts of engineering and more on the higher-level pieces. So instead of having to engineer an actual switch that does something, you can use some off-the-shelf LEGOs so that you don't have to spend so long doing physics and some other basic things that take all of your time."
The teams build pre-programmed robots — no one's behind them with a controller — and they design and program them to do a specific task or mission. Each year, the league centers tasks around a certain theme or industry. This year's was archaeology.
“They had to invent something to help archaeologists do their jobs better. The team went out and did research, actually talked to actual archaeologists in the field, and then came up with an innovation project, a way to help those archaeologists."
But completing the mission is only one part of the competition. Judges also score teams on how they present their robots, the originality of their innovation projects, and how well they demonstrate core values like teamwork.
"The funny thing is they measure the teamwork portion along the way with those other three portions of it. The robot design, the presentation — they really have some things they're looking for around how your team works together. But the only way you're able to create a really great presentation is by everybody on that team being able to work together to begin with. There's so much work to be done. You really got to spread it out. Everybody does the work and everybody helps out. Really, that's one of the things I love most about this program — in the real world, your engineering skill is only going to be 25% as an outcome in life anyway, as an engineer. The rest is how you're able to interact and work with others. And this program helps you focus on that so much."
And this specific team had to work hard outside of the competition to make it to the world championships. Co-coach Jenn Gandy says they had to raise roughly $30,000 to get to Korea, and achieved that goal through old-fashioned fundraising tactics like a GoFundMe campaign, tabling at farmers' markets, making pitches in person.
"Door to door to local businesses. They just walked into businesses all around Bentonville and chatted with business owners and really got to tell their story a lot, which was so much fun for them. I think they going into this were feeling kind of nervous about how are we going to raise this. This is such a huge amount of money — raising almost $30,000, or more than $30,000 in the end, for six kids in fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh grade, that just felt kind of insurmountable. And I think once they started and started getting just such positive feedback from the community, so much encouragement, you just saw the kids getting more and more excited every time. I actually missed the fundraising part of it now that they're done with it. I feel like it was just so team-building and so community-building and just so encouraging for them."
"It's the teamwork portion, but it's also the storytelling. You've got a thing that can change the world, but until you can tell the world about it, it's not going to get unlocked. And so what these kids learned to do — it was so great watching Hannah. She was probably our best fundraiser because she had a way that she would interact with people in a really natural way. And then she would bring them in and she would tell the story and she got so good. Basically what she was doing was sales, she didn't even know what she was doing. She's fifth grade. She's the one girl on the team and there are five boys. And she ran circles around them with this, which was so neat to see."
And of course, there's another member of this team: the robot. The Iron Patriots call theirs William, or Bill Frog, because of his squat design. Dave Gandy says he's about the size of a grapefruit and is the product of a function-first design approach.
"What they figured out by looking at all the missions this year and really studying them early on was they could do almost everything they needed to do with just a hammer. So they basically built this robot arm with a little hammer on the end, and they use it to hit stuff. They use it to lift, they use it to drag, they use it to do all these really neat things. One of the guys had figured out, 'Oh, we can solve this mission in this way.' So we built this attachment that had probably a couple hundred pieces on it, and it worked really well. It was great. And then Hannah came over. She looked at it. She took the robot arm, she flipped it over the other way, and she added one single pin to it, and she figured out how to get it to do the same job with one single pin. And so we cheered because we figured out how to do it with fewer pieces. And if it wasn't for the work of the first kid solving the hard part — the really hard part of how we're going to do this — we'd never have gotten to the next level: how do we do it even simpler."
If you're interested in getting your student involved in a local robotics program, check out technobotics.org for more information.
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