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By Rama K. Ramaswamy
FIRST LEGO League, a featured participant at the Wellesley STEM Expo 2014-15, encourages volunteer parent-coaches, regardless of their expertise, to set up teams of children to lead, apply what they know, discover new and unique solutions and direct their own learning within a project-based, LEGO building, robotics curriculum in teams of children, aged 10-14 years old.
This season, Wellesley had about eight teams meeting regularly since September. The series of qualifiers were directed by FLL and ran through November and December in various towns such as Revere and Northborough.
Parent coaches and their teams include Alexa and Robert Plengewho were back for their second year with the Bates Bots, a team of fifth grade girls in Bates School; coach Marybeth Martello and Joseph Baron’s team, also an all girls team, called G-Force also returned for a second season; and coaches Srinivas Reddy, Robert Jensen and Olin College student Hannah Wilk coached an all girls team called Robogirls, in their first season with members from Sprague, Hardy and Upham.
In addition. Brainstormers were in their second year of FLL with coaches Sheila Olson, Henry Dormitzer and Anil Kelkar; coaches Larry Cai and Christine Carpenter lead team C.S.I for their first attempt this season; Master Mindstormers with coach Kristen Toffer; and Boss Bates Robotics with coach Traci Battle.
Wellesley’s five teams at the WPI state championships were Robogirls, Master Mindstormers, G-Force, Brainstormers and Bates Bots.
According to Reddy and Jensen the overall experience of being first time coaches was “very rewarding. To see these fifth grade girls learn and grow so quickly and compete at such a high level makes us want to come back even stronger next year. We are a young team with at least three years of eligibility left in FLL. We hope to improve each year and learn valuable lessons along the way.”
Reddy described how Robogirls hit a snag at the WPI championships.
“We faced a major unexpected hurdle just before the state tournament started at WPI,” Reddy said. “We learned that the table wall height at the state tournament was different from the one at the regional tournament, interfering with robot movement. With less than 30 minutes to spare, the girls had to scramble to make mechanical changes and associated programming modifications to address the issue. They did it. While the girls were clearly disenchanted with the last minute surprise, it perfectly emulated real life conditions STEM professionals face regularly.”
Toffer said, “Our team did a lot of team building exercises. The ones they really liked the most (so we did many of these) were timed challenges that were designed to help them work together as a team and work on constructing something out of all sorts of different materials. They built with Mega Blocks, LEGO bricks, spaghetti noodles, building straws and newspaper to name a few.
“The team also decided to take their robot design from last year, which was simple and small, and improved on it this season rather than taking team time to redesign a totally new one. In the end, they had a robot that was small, simple yet very effective for the tasks they elected to do this season in the robot challenge and it served them well, they won the Robot Performance award with it at the Boston Qualifier Tournament. As a coach, I would say in ways they were following the basic idea of the design concept "keep it simple stupid" (KISS) principle, with the way they approached their simple yet effective robot design and programing.”
At the end of this FLL season at WPI, Team G-Force, won Second Place for the Gracious Professionalism Award, an award they also won at their qualifier. Team Robogirls won the ‘Team Work Award’ at their qualifier.
As Reddy put it, “The FLL tournament setting can be very intimidating, especially for the rookies. We really didn't know what to expect. To score over 600 points and take first place out of 24 teams exceeded all our expectations. It is mind boggling what a 10-year old can do these days. They have unlimited potential. We simply need to find a better way to tap into it.”
Added Toffer, “My team was very excited to receive a golden ticket to the state tournament. The team felt being invited to compete at the state tournament was a huge honor and achievement. The state tournament was very exciting to see all the teams, their robots and the diversity of projects. The team was focused and performed very well and felt good at the end of the day about what they had achieved.”
FLL’s motto is, “what we discover is more important than what we win.” For more information and to sign up to coach or be part of an FLL team, email [email protected].
Rama K. Ramaswamy writes for Hometown Weekly. She can be reached at [email protected].
