Lego League gets ready to rumble
JEFFERSON TWP— Kyle Lewis gives his Legos brains.
He's in his second year of Lego League at Knoch Middle School and bursting to share how he takes red, blue and gray blocks and makes them move.
Lego League creates Lego robots that will perform tasks in a December competition hosted by Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Eighteen students from third to seventh grade are on the Mechanical Madness team at Knoch this year, twice as many as in the inaugural year.
The competition also includes a research portion that will include a presentation in front of judges.That's how the league's leader, Jeffrey Beckstead of Saxonburg, first became involved. Beckstead, a physicist, was a judge for the FIRST robotics competition several years ago. In the robotics competition, high school students build robots the size of a mini-fridge.Beckstead liked what he saw and decided to start a Lego League, a kind of Little League for FIRST.In the first year, he had about 10 students and just one team. More students signed up this year and he will have two groups competing in Pittsburgh.This year he has corporate sponsors on board and was able to purchase five kits — enough Lego pieces for two teams and some extras for experimenting. The league meets on Mondays and as competition nears, will add Fridays to its schedule.The teams will also use two laptops to program the computer blocks that drive the robots.That's how Kyle, a sixth grade student, spent his Monday evening in the orchestra room of the middle school. He created chains of icons representing actions on the screen in front of them.He worked with maps and diagrams to decide how to get to a spot and return. He can choose to time how long the robot moves in a particular direction or to determine the number of times a gear rotates.At the same time, he taught Becky Korff, another fifth grade student, how to use software to program the yellow blocks that drive the robots.Don Shar of Penn Township, a parent volunteer, explained the programs range from a simple sequence of events to a series of if-then statements. Each yellow computer block, which becomes the central part of all the Lego robots, can hold five programs.
On the other side of the room, a group of students were huddled around a table much like a hockey table, except scattered with odd marks and small machines.Julianna Slomer and Hannah Pfeifer, both fifth grade students, were trying to get a forklift made from Legos to move a 4-inch box to a docking station on another machine. The forklift must then flip a bucket at the top of the docking station so blue plastic blocks fall into the box below.It's one of eight tasks the students hope to complete in two minutes at the Lego League competition. Two teams at a time will try for the points at the competition on side-by-side tables.They'll be scored on the number of tasks they complete as well as on the program designs. Kyle said a good score is about 180 points of a possible 290 points.Part of the score will be on a research project. Beckstead said this year's topic is nanotechnology. He and his wife, Diane, spent the final minutes of Monday's meeting talking about possible ideas.Some of the Lego robot tasks mimic the concepts of nanotechnology. For example, the students are asked to get a robot to drive from "base" to the center of the table where a Lego shaped like an arm bone sits. The robot should dump a "medicine" ball into a trough carved in the bone.In all of the tasks, students aren't allowed to touch the Lego robots except when they are in base.That means Kyle not only has to scheme plans to get the robot out to its destination and perform its task, he needs to make sure it returns to base so it can go on its next job.After the December competition at CMU, the students will have a few more lessons. Beckstead said the students will come back and take apart the Legos and try to learn what they could do better for the next year.Even if they don't do better than their midway finish at last year's competition, Shar said the students are still learning how to work in teams.
