Imagine waking up early to get to school around 6:15 AM to grab computers and Lego Mindstorms kits, then going to the room and starting practice. For Middle School Lego Robotics, that’s exactly what they do. It can be stressful towards the end of the season as they only have one practice a week from 6:30 to 7:30 AM. From programming the codes to testing them, team members are getting prepared for the competitions.
The Lego Robotics challenge for this year is a game where competitors have to follow a green line with sharp turns and a gap. While doing this, they will have to individually hold and drop ping-pong balls from their robot into different slots, indicated by a blue line on top of the green line. The other challenge is a thirty-minute time slot where the teams are given a new challenge that nobody knows and only have thirty minutes to create a new code and build add-ons to make their robot work for the challenge.
This year there are three teams. One of them is Team Fein, with Henry Flodeen, Kaiden Hall, Sebastian Medcraft, and Mackston Conway. Another is Team Fighting Chickens with Amanda McDonald, Conner Chavis, and Mason Ohnstad. Lastly, Team “Pick a Name” with two homeschooled kids. Each team has its unique ways to design their project, and each member is assigned to specific roles. Two of these teams, Team Fein and Team Fighting Chickens, have their plans and roles assigned already.
Team Fein’s design is a horizontal conveyor belt-like track controlled by a medium motor with small walls to separate the ping pong balls. As the belt spins on top of the robot, it drops one ball at a time. At this time Henry and Seb are the builders, Mackston is the coder, and Kaiden does whatever is needed. Henry explained, “Building the design might look complicated but the real challenge is the coding.” Kaiden Hall says “I don’t really know anything about coding.” In case someone is missing the day of competition, the others will need to learn to code. “Even though we need more coders, me and Seb are learning,” said Henry.
The Fighting Chickens are a team of three. Two builders, Conner Chavis and Mason Ohnstad, and one coder Amanda McDonald. Their design plan is to build a box as the main piece, then build an X-shaped wall on it that will spin shooting out the ping pong balls as needed. “I am excited for the competition and getting to show off my robot” declared Amanda.
The end of the season is in December when all the members of the team get on a bus and go to a gym. When they are at the gym, the team will be assigned a table and will test their robot on some practice courts. After a while, the referees will have them put their robot into a designated area. Next, they wait until they are called to the courts. Last, they will complete their trials a few times and they get scored on time and points. After that occurs, they will have thirty minutes to build and code their robot to make it ready for the final competition. Depending on what the challenge is, which is unknown until later, they will put their robot through that challenge. Last year they used 1v1 matches on a bracket so that the winners would go up against each other.
In the end, waking up early pays off because Lego robotics teaches problem-solving, math, and quick thinking. Overall, this would be a good sport for sixth, seventh graders, and eighth graders. Eighth graders can join the high school robotics team. It just depends on how they feel about coding and building, and if they feel ready to move on to do more complicated things.
