Ballston Spa teams shine in Lego League qualifier
BALLSTON SPA, N.Y. » The Ballston Spa Central School District’s For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) Lego League Challenge Teams recently competed in a virtual Hudson Valley Qualifying Tournament.
The district fielded five teams for the 2020-2021 season thanks to donations from the district’s corporate sponsors.
Teams of up to 10 fourth, fifth and sixth graders from throughout the district’s elementary and middle schools have been meeting virtually since October.
This year’s challenge, titled RePLAY, required students to focus on how and where they can help people be more active. It required students to design a Lego robot that was programmed to operate independently on the competition table and accomplish several design and construction related tasks.
The teams were judged based on the robot’s performance, robot design, core values and innovation project.
Ballston Spa’s teams Motors in Action and Golden Creators both won awards and will be moving on to the Hudson Valley Championship Tournament on March 27.
Motors in Action earned the Core Values Award and the Golden Creators won the Robot Design Award.
Ballston Spa alumna Lauren
Brady, who helped mentor all five teams as well as the high school’s Team 3044, was selected for the Coach/Mentor Award at the tournament for best exemplifying the FIRST Core Values in her mentoring, her leadership and guidance.
Ballston Spa High School students in the program served as mentors for the younger teams and assisted the coaches.
The FIRST Lego League season looked different for teams this year compared to usual.
Since the teams were meeting virtually, the students designed sketches of the attachments they would add to the robot as well as the code for each mission. These were shared electronically with the coaches, who tried to make the attachment based on the sketch, downloaded the students’ code and tested the ideas using a webcam to show the performance during meetings, so students could identify what adjustments they would need to make. Ideas were evaluated by the teams using polls during the virtual meetings and teams collaborated on shared documents to create their presentations for the judges.
The district’s 2020-21 Robotics initiative is possible based on the support from the Ballston Spa National Bank and CSArch to fund participation in the annual U.S. FIRST Robotics competition.