Student builders take LEGOs to the next level

LEGOs are a toy for some.
But for 10 students at Lumpkin County Middle School, LEGOs are a tool.
And now a trophy.
The Lumpkin County Middle School LEGO Team won the Tennessee Valley/North Georgia Region FIRST LEGO League competition as well as the Robot Performance Award, which was presented to the team during the last week of school.
The competition is put on by FIRST, which defines itself as “a global robotics community preparing young people for the future.” The competition consists of different categories where points can be earned, including Robot Performance, where a robot, built and programmed by the team, completes different challenges to earn points for the team and an innovation project, where members of the team built a utopian model of a community, designing all of the components inside from the different landforms and structures that make up the area to the activities inhabitants can take part in.
For LCMS STEAM (Science, technology, engineering, arts and math) teacher Tori Jones, the FIRST LEGO League was an opportunity for her kids, so she did the extra work.
“I had heard about FIRST LEGO League...so I went to a week training at Georgia Tech and learned to use the robotics for the FIRST LEGO League,” Jones said. “Then I was able to get grants to start the team. It’s costly to start it...It’s close to $400 to get going at least.”
Thanks to grants from Boeing, the American Insititute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Department of Defense, Jones was able to get the club up and running.
From there, it was about finding students that were interested in being on the team.
“The main thing that made me really want to join the team was just how the idea of building a robot and designing and driving the robot really just seemed to be super fun,” said then-eighth grader Samuel Fuerstenberg.
Caleb Pfrogner agreed.
“I thought it would be really cool to build a robot out of actual LEGOs like a childhood thing you would build,” he said.
Now in the team’s second year, the group came into this year’s competition with a little more understanding of what to do.
The team began practicing, researching and building in the fall. By April, the team was ready to compete and win.
In the robot performance category, the team had to construct a custom robot ready to perform the particular tasks of the challenge from a basic kit.
“There’s kits that come with the pieces,” Fuerstenberg said. “There’s a brick, kind of like a little computer thing and that’s your main program. You can put programs onto it and there’s ports that you connect stuff to that makes like a gear spin or something. So we actually built the robot and then the cables and ports, those told certain motors to spin and that’s what allowed  our forklift and wheels to spin.”
This year’s challenges all revolved around exercise. With different obstacles and tasks around the game board representing different exercise movements, such as flipping tires and using a rowing machine. The team realized a commonality in many of the tasks.
“We were looking at our game table and we noticed that a lot of the missions that we had to do, there was a lot of raising or lowering something, or pushing it, so we decided to make a forklift and we made it so it would be easy to put more pieces onto it,” said Mathieu Weber. “...That’s how we decided on our design overall.”
However, the team doesn’t control the robot during the period. Instead, it relies solely on the instructions programmed in beforehand by the students.
Jones, who coaches the team in tandem with her husband, said that the program allows her kids the opportunity to gain a lot of key skills, including coding.
“I think it opens doors to them,” she said. “They’ve maybe done a little coding in elementary school, a little coding in some of their classes, but this gives them the opportunity to go deeper with it and to go into the robotics. Almost every field has been affected by technology so knowing how to code is critical now for almost any job.”
And after winning the competition this spring, Jones and the returning members of the team have already set their sights on continuing that same success.
“We’ve already started recruiting for next year,” Jones said. “...Mathieu plans to return next year so he’ll show a lot of leadership on the team next year.”
As for rising ninth graders Fuerstenberg and Hailey Rentz, after competing with the team at LCMS, the two now hope to start a team at the high school.
“We’re going to talk to Mr. Kirk,” Rentz said.
Jones said a high school robotics program would open even more doors for the students, including potential college scholarships.
“The FIRST Programs, they actually have programs for high school as well and in high school, they have scholarships that kids can apply for if they’ve been a part of those programs and so they’re recognized worldwide,” she said.