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Students showed off their hard work recently at a demonstration for parents and teachers at the middle school.
The Lumpkin County Middle School Lego Club is building a legacy of success brick by brick.
In its third season of “FIRST LEGO League” the club is seeing plenty of interest from students.
The idea is for participants to design a solution to a real-life inspired problem that is suggested to them as part of the competition.
“Each year, there is a different theme to the competition,” said faculty sponsor Tori Jones. “This year’s theme was Cargo Connect.”
Jones, the middle school S.T.E.A.M. Teacher outlined the types of tasks they must complete.
“Students brainstorm solutions, conduct research, build a model, present their innovative solution to professionals and incorporate their feedback into improving the project,” she said. “They then develop a presentation for the Innovation Project competition portion of the tournament.”
Students prepare a presentation, Jones said, in order to let the judges know how they designed the robot, created the computer programs, and solved missions on the game table.
7th grader Vera Carson said she likes the way students have to use skills like computer programming and research to be successful.
“They give us the main topic and we have to create our own solution,” Carson said.
Jones said the FIRST LEGO League website explains this year’s topic: “How can you improve the transportation of products? Identify a specific problem within this theme that you want to solve. Then, create or improve a piece of equipment, a technology, or a method of transportation to solve your specific problem.”
Seventh grader Kelton Holubitsky said team members learn things in the competition that will help them later on in school, “such as how to be a problem solver and how to work together as a team.”
He said that typically four students design the robot and the rest of the team works on the presentation.
Jones said that for the robotic portion of the competition, students need to determine which missions on the game mat that they want to attempt.
“The game run is only two and a half minutes long, so teams must evaluate the missions and select the ones that they want to accomplish,” the teacher said. “They then need to design a robot, with attachments and sensors that will help them solve the missions. Some missions require lifting and moving objects, so HyperX designed their robot to include a forklift to be able to do that.”
She said that students learn to program the robot to accomplish the tasks.
Jones added that students increase their potential for points by combining some of the missions since time is a factor.
Seventh grader Mathieu Weber said the competitions can be very stressful at the beginning but become more fun later on.
Weber said the students on the team like to think of their approach as “Coopertition” (a combination of cooperation and competition).
WINNING WAYS
Jones said due to last year’s Lumpkin team winning the Champions Award and the Robot Game Award in the virtual TN Valley/NGA Regional Tournament, a lot of excitement and interest in the club was created.
“So when we got started this school year, we had almost twice the number of students who wanted to participate,” she said. “So we added a second team.”
Blackburn Elementary School also fielded a team of fifth graders this year, Jones said. Grades 4-8 are eligible to participate in FLL.
Recently the middle school’s HyperX team won the Innovation Award and the Hybrid Haul team won an award for Excellence in Engineering at the Regional Qualifying Tournament in Adairsville.
The Blackburn Elementary team won the Robot Game Award for the most points in the game, Jones added.
Due to winning at the qualifier, the teams could then compete in the Tennessee Valley/North Georgia Regional Championship in January, where the HyperX team earned 2nd Place in Robot Design, Jones said.
HyperX team is coached by Dr. Joseph Jones and Tori Jones. Members include Solomon Alhadeff, Vera Carson, Brewer Dansby-Sparks, William Giles, Braxton Mills, Jose Sanchez-Resendiz and Mathieu Weber. Hybrid Haul team is coached by Alison Alhadeff, Chris Phillips and Brandy Phillips. Team members include Bowen Aiken, Liam Alhadeff, Carol Bell, Grant Dansby-Sparks, Jack Estenson, Kelton Holubitsky, Conner Moye, Makayla Prosser and Cooper Sexton. The Blackburn Elementary team is coached by Susan Corvacchioli and Melanie Charles. Members include Steven Garbuzovas, Jackson Gerholdt, Eileen Sandoval, Sheili Sandoval and Wyatt Strayhorn.
LOOKING AHEAD
The future of FLL looks bright, Jones said.
“With students coming to the middle school next year that have experienced the fun of being a part of FLL while in elementary school, I predict that we might need to have three teams at LCMS, which will require more coaches,” she said. “So we will definitely need more volunteers.”
Jones said that after seeing the great benefit to the students, it became a personal goal to get the FLL program started in all Lumpkin schools.
“The elementary school teams will feed into the middle school teams, so I anticipate that FLL will continue to grow in Lumpkin County as more students have the opportunity to learn robotics,” she said.
For more information visit the TN Valley Robotics website at www.tnvrobotics.org