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by Rama K. Ramaswamy
FIRST LEGO League, a featured participant at the Wellesley STEM Expo 2014-15 and the one coming up on April 8, encourages volunteer parent-coaches, regardless of their expertise, to set up teams of children. The children will lead, apply what they know, discover new and unique solutions and direct their own learning within a project-based, LEGO-building, robotics curriculum.
There are junior FLL teams as well as those for children aged 10-14 years old. This year, Wellesley has 3 teams of middle school aged children who have been meeting regularly for the last three months. All three Wellesley teams qualified over the last few weeks at different meets scattered all over Boston and its suburbs, winning “the golden ticket” to proceed to the Massachusetts State Championships.
Parent-coaches Srinivas Reddy and Robert Jensen lead team Robogirls for the second year. This year’s challenge was called “Animal Allies,” and required students to address a problem between animals and humans. Team Robogirls chose the topic of bees. The team put together a poster, prepared a skit along with a rap explaining the importance and mutual benefits of bee-human ecosystem sustainability. When asked how this year’s challenge was when compared to last year for Robogirls, Reddy said: “This year’s robot game is definitely much more difficult than previous years, requiring the teams to be flawless with no room for errors. Missions are dependent on each other - a small issue with one mission could impact all the subsequent missions. It’s been a humbling experience for many teams. The varying table conditions and slight differences in the playing field only add to the degree of difficulty. Overall, this [FLL] is a terrific experience for the kids and teams, as most real world technical problems are complex. While building and programming an autonomous vehicle isn’t that complicated, dealing with abnormal conditions makes it one of the most difficult technical challenges in the world today. Imagine running your pre-programed robot, within very precise parameters, outdoors, right after a blizzard.”
The Master Mindstormers, who won the Research Award.
Team Robot Raiders, led by husband and wife team Robert and Alexa Plenge, said: “We were quite surprised by the outcome, but thrilled. The girls have an affinity for pandas, so quickly chose this species when we identified an important opportunity. The girls’ idea is to create a panda school, which would take captive pandas on field trips outside of the captive environments to learn how to act and think like a panda might in the wild. The girls created skits to show how wild pandas conduct these activities and what the captive pandas would need to learn on their field trips.
“As a coach, I was apprehensive about the idea of presenting the panda behaviors and our field trip idea through a skit, as I thought it would be complicated to create characters, scripts, narration, props with our limited planning time, and I wasn’t sure we could fully communicate our ideas in the 5 minutes that we had with the judges. Well, we won the award for the project presentation, which is a reminder to let the girls come up with and develop their own ideas, and they might just be better than what adults might do with a very different set of biases. We were told early on that as coaches, we should facilitate for the girls, but be sure not to get in their way as it’s amazing what their young minds can produce. We have certainly seen this firsthand.”
When asked about the FLL mission this year as compared to last year, coach Alexa Plenge said: “We all agree that the robot missions were much harder this year. I think the creators of the FLL Robot Challenge can build different levels of complexity into the robot missions and assign lower or higher point totals. We had trouble replicating successful missions time and time again, and the point totals overall were lower this year. While last year we remember seeing teams with robot scores in the 700s, this year the highest score at our event was around 200.”
According to coach Robert Plenge: “The other parents were much more engaged in the robot programming this year”.
Once again this year, Coach Kristen Toffer lead team Master Mindstormers, comprised of current sixth-graders at WMS, and attended the Boston University Academy Qualifier Tournament. Master Mindstormers won the Research Award for their project: improving interactions between anglers and fish.
According to coach Toffer, “The way they set out to do this was by making a soft, biodegradable fishing lure that is edible that could be used by anglers instead of soft plastic lures. They learned that sometimes, one or more soft plastic lures (think soft rubbery plastic worm) can hurt fish by getting stuck in their stomach, potentially causing them to starve and/or die, and these lures can also remain in the environment, posing other potential environmental threats. They developed their own recipe for a biodegradable lure that is easy to make and affordable. It uses edible ingredients found in grocery stores. The team had fun testing out their different recipes at two local ponds in Wellesley - one recipe caught 10 fish in one trip. They also tested the biodegradability of their lures by placing them in pond water, and at 24 days, their lures had degraded while a traditional soft plastic lure had not changed.”
Toffer also said: “As a coach, it has been exciting to see how the team has developed and how each member has utilized different strengths and interests to make the whole team better. It has been amazing to see what they accomplished. The tournament last weekend was a fun event. To see 23 different teams from all over Massachusetts and what their FLL projects were and how their robots performed - an amazing show of creativity in the youth participating!”
A member of the Master Mindstormers team found the tournament to be “exciting, suspenseful and entertaining.”
Coach Toffer added the following sentiment: “The team had support from other parents, serving as coaches/ mentors in various capacities, to help guide them through the season - we all learned together and even had a fun parent-family-team fishing outing with the team’s lures.”
There can only be one winning team after the State Championships at Worchester Polytechnic Institute, and that team will compete in the next round: Nationals. Parents, friends and supporters plan to cheer on their three Wellesley teams at WPI.
