Community Kids’ FIRST LEGO League robotics team participated in a tournament against 31 other teams on Saturday, December 3rd, 2016. Keystone’s team received silver medals, and they won the trophy for Core Values, meaning that they displayed the highest level of professionalism, cooperation and teamwork.
The Core Values Award requires students to collaboratively solve a problem, on the spot, with no guidance from an adult coach. “Some of the core values are: We are a team. We do all the work to find solutions with guidance. We know our coaches and mentors don’t have all the answers. We learn together and we will get the answer,” explains Samuel.
The FIRST LEGO League competition required students to build and program an autonomous robot.“As one of the programmers, I had to use different programming blocks in LEGO Mindstorm EV3 to program the robot,” Community Kids participant Bethlehem explains. “There were 15 missions to complete this year. We didn’t have to do all of them, so we chose three missions to focus on before we moved on with more missions. For each mission, we had to make many changes: how far we wanted the robot to go, how wide and how fast. We made these changes in the programming blocks, because there are buttons where we can choose the number of rotations, angle and power. It was very challenging to program, but it was fun also.”
Each team is also required to engineer a solution to a real-world problem, this year, on the theme of Animal Allies. Community Kids focused its research on Giant Pandas. “The problem we found is that when FedEx Express transports pandas on a plane, their hearing is at risk,” Lakeesha explains. “Our solution is the 2017XIXI, the name of the ear device we have designed, which will help them not risk losing their hearing. It works by putting it in the pandas’ ears before the pandas go in a plane. The ear device will help them reset the pressure in their ears as the plane takes off and lands.”
Students were pleased with their competition success and look forward to competing next year! Community Kids hopes to add a second team to meet demand!