The Oneida Daily Dispatch (Oneida, NY)
Students compete in Lego robotics
Robotics teams compete in FIRST Lego Regional Championship scrimmage
To a kid, Legos can become anything they imagine. And to future engineers, Legos can become the first step in a long road.
The Oneida Public Library hosted four teams Thursday practicing and perfecting their robots for the upcoming FIRST Lego Regional Championship: Everlasting EV3, GenWorx Oughtamation, Dragon Bots of Clinton and Holy Cross Academy.
Scrimmage for the championship entails testing the team’s robot on a tabletop course, which featured a number of tasks related to the season’s theme. This year, it’s hydrodynamics and the missions on the board included moving broken pipes, carrying water and removing sludge.
For research projects, students had to come up with an idea that revolved around water and improving the lives of people with it.
Dragon Bots want to build a bike that powers a small plasma generator that can remove organic pollutants from the water, an idea inspired by NASA.
Everlasting EV3 think that by using a two-layer semi-permeable plastic membrane, they can improve the taste of water and clean it at the same time.
Holy Cross want to design a special kind of sink that dis-
penses the exact amount of water requested to cut down the waste of water.
And GenWorx Oughtamation want to use a special plastic that cools down passively to create a more effective solar still to purify water for third world countries.
But there’s more to the competition besides building and designing a robot out of Legos.
“We’re teaching the fundamentals of engineering and work ethics here,” Everlasting EV3 Coach Greg Bush said. “There’s actually four parts to the robotic competition. First is the actual competition table, the presentation of how they designed the robot, the research project and a presentation on core values.
There are eight core values the teams work on. Discovery, team spirit, integration, effectiveness, efficiency, inclusion, respect and ‘coopertition’, a combination of cooperation and competition.
Even while kids design, build and go headto- head against each other, they learn to work together and take new skills with them.
As the children grow older and get into more complicated leagues, they start to teach what they’ve learned. “We’ve taught three classes this summer. One in Utica and one in the Oneida Library to help teach kids about robotics, and one in Rome to teach kids about robotics and en- courage them to join teams,” eighth grader Regan Kohler of GenWorx Oughtamation said.
“And we ran a booth at the New York State Fair,” sixth grader Mason Netzband of GenWorx Oughtamation said. “We encouraged people to join robotics team in the area or start their own and showed them our robot and some of the programs.”
While Kohler and Netzband are on the same team, they view things slightly differently. When asked if the robotics club was more of a hobby or something they’d want to do in the future, Kohler said both.
“I want to go to college for electrical engineering,” Kohler said. “And doing robotics here is going to help me.”
Netzband said it was a hobby for himand looked forward to inspiring more kids.
“I want to encourage kids to learn about programming,” Netzband said, admitting that he wanted to be something like a teacher when he got older.
Par ticipation on a team is year round. On top of the classes offered in the summer, teams try to meet once a week during the spring and sometimes twice a week during the fall as competitions loom. Children from ages eight and up are participating in this particular FIRST Lego League Challenge, but contests extend to the collegiate levels as well.
Businesses looking to sponsor teams are encouraged, as teams get most of their money from grants and fundraising.