Award-Winning Teamwork At The Fraser-Woods School

By Martha Coville

The Fraser-Woods School students participating in an international robotics competition sponsored by Lego have consistently won awards at the state and regional level.

Peter Becker, who supervises The Fraser-Woods School’s team, said that the student members recently won a teamwork award at a regional “qualifying” competition, the same award they won last year at the state championship. He also said that at this year’s state championship, the team placed fourth out of 50 teams, and won a prize for robot design.

Lego partners with a nonprofit organization called FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) to run the robotics competition as the FIRST Lego League (FLL). FIRST’s mission is to mentor students in science and technology.

Essentially, the FLL competition presents teams of up to ten students with a two-part scientific challenge. Then, competing teams present their solutions at tournaments. These are noisy, bustling places; in fact, the FLL intentionally fosters an athletic, rather than an academic, atmosphere. They call their competition “sports for the mind,” and the sportslike atmosphere is as important to the program as the scientific challenge.

This year, the FLL challenge was called “Power Puzzle: Energy Resources — Meeting the Global Demand.” The first part of the challenge required students to build a small autonomous robot able to perform simple “missions,” such as placing small plastic “solar panels” on a Lego house. The Fraser-Woods students designed and built a Lego robot, and programmed it to perform its missions using software provided by Lego. Mr Becker described the software program as “a visual, object-orientated drag and drop program,” and said that it is actually fairly simple to use.

Mr Becker said the challenge “could loosely be described as an obstacle course on a map.” The goal of the first part of the FLL challenge was to create and program a robot capable of completing 13 missions in under two and a half minutes.

A Two-Part Challenge

When The Bee visited The Fraser-Woods School, the team was putting the finishing touches on their “missions.” The team members had already picked out a route for their robot to follow, and decided the order in which it would move the smaller Lego components around the map. Their robot buzzed along a square “field map,” glued to a table top. The map — green, and blue and white — represented a small community, complete with housing, roads, a small farm, a coal mine, and several other energy resources.

Each task fit into the FLL’s “Power Puzzle” theme: in one, the robot “planted” plastic Lego trees on a green area of the map; for another, it “harvested” corn from an area designated as farmland. Other tasks included using the robot to move a Lego rail car, loaded with “coal” along rail tracks, picking up small barrels of “oil” from a little oil drilling platform, and placing a hydro dome, a power plant, wind turbines, and a grid connection in appropriate places on the map.

The second part of the challenge required students to research the different energy sources the Lego props represented. They were required, for example, to examine “personal vehicle choice” and received points if they recycled a Lego truck in favor of a hybrid car. How students provided power to the power plant on the map was also an important to this part of the challenge. For example, they could chose to fuel the plant with coal or with hydro-electric power, among other energy sources, as long as they justified their choices. According the FLL website, certain choices are awarded more points than others. However, the website also says the judges remain interested in the students’ decisionmaking process.

At tournaments, teams are judged according to four criteria. A team’s overall score is determined by its teamwork, the robot’s performance, its design, and student presentation of the team’s project, with each of the four categories weighed equally.

‘Nano Nachos’

Mr Becker said that his team voted to call itself “Nano Nachos” when it tackled last year’s challenge, which was nano robotics. “One of the kids came up with it, as much to be funny as anything else,” he said, “and it stuck. I think it’s here to stay.” While, the ten students on the Nano Nachos team range in age from 8 to 11, they usually compete against students up to 14 years old.

On the day of The Bee’s visit, about half of the team members stood around the table, tinkering with the robot, and moving the “obstacles” around, while the others took turns describing the FLL program.

“Well, first of all,” student Will Mitchell said, “We won the teamwork award [at the November 17 regional competition], which is very hard to win.” The Nano Nachos team beat out 14 other teams to win the award, a large trophy cup made from yellow Legos. The team also placed fourth overall.

Mr Becker said that the judges examine each group’s teamwork very carefully. “They come around to each team and really ask all the students questions to make sure everyone was involved in making all the decisions,” he said. According the FLL website, the judges look for “group problem-solving skills,” “positive team interaction and group dynamics,” and an “understanding of and respect for others.”

Making decisions as a group is essential to winning the FLL challenge. Mr Becker said, “My job is a facilitator, and I really try to stay out of the decisionmaking process.” He said he values the program as it teaches students to “attack problems with brainstorming. I decided to [do] the robotics program,” he said, “because I saw it as a great, fun introduction to programming design and engineering, and a great complement to the school’s strong cultural education.”

Will Mitchell enthusiastically described the sportslike atmosphere of the tournaments. “There were like, 50 teams, at the [Connecticut state championship],” he said. “There were people upstairs, and then downstairs, and there was lots of noise.” Teammate Zeeshan Pothiawala added, “It was fun to go to tournaments. We got this trophy and we [all] got medals.”

The students broke the program’s requirements down into manageable parts. Explaining how they settled on the robot design, Zeeshan said, “We just make different attachments for the basic robot, but in the end, at the tournament, we’ll only use one.”

Teammates explained that between the November 17 regional tournament and the December 18 Connecticut state championship, they retooled their robot. “If possible, we’re gonna work on a few more missions,” Henry Mitchell said. Mr Becker also said that between the two tournaments, Brian Keller’s “ingenuity and persistency” with the programming software “gave the robot enough time to accomplish other missions the team had solutions for, but always ran of time during the competition to run.”

By the time the state championship rolled around in December, the team’s hard work had paid off. Mr Becker said that the Nano Nachos placed fourth out of 50 teams, and earned second place in the robot design category.

The team was also one of five awarded a $ 200 prize from the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. In the spirit of good team work, they voted on how to spend the money, and decided to split evenly among several student-run charities at The Fraser-Woods School.