For the GreenR Bots 45059 competitive STEM team, this year has certainly started with a bang, and with more excitement on the way. Just a few weeks ago, this team of 12- and 13-year-olds won the first place Champion’s Award at Ontario’s FIRST Lego League (FLL) Championship, which takes them on to Houston, Texas, in April.
The GreenR Bots team, made of up Abdurrahman, Sanjay, Rex, Ted, and Sebastian, work out of Techplace in Burlington, as part of the Halton STEM Club, alongside a youth mentor and adult mentor Frank He.
The FLL competition has two parts; a themed project (this year, “energy”) and a robot, built with Lego parts. The robot must complete challenges on a game table within 2.5 minutes, finding its way around autonomously via motor, with lots of gear and different styles of sensor. The idea is to maximize the points with the challenges, but judges also give points if the robots touch certain things, and how reliable they are. He notes that as Lego parts are not particularly reliable, the team must work together to trouble-shoot and problem-solve.
For the energy portion of the competition, the GreenR Bots decided to mock up two skyrise buildings with a wind turbine mounted in between them to make use of the buildings’ wind tunnel. They have put in many hours of work: they settled on this idea back in October and meet twice a week for a few hours.
While other STEM clubs provide instruction, in He’s experience, the Halton STEM Club is different: mentors ask wide, open-ended questions, perhaps some inspiration and guidance, but the kids do all the work. Lots of idea generation, exploring, trial and error: learning through experience. The team works together to try out their ideas, see what works, and then try to make it better. They sometimes get frustrated when things don’t work according to plan, says He, but they keep going and try something else. They will also reach out to experts, learning about communication while improving their work, as another part of their challenge is to get that real-world input, and make their project as realistic as possible.
He, who is an engineer at Rockwell Automation (who have sponsored lots of activities and registrations for the club), says that a big part of his role as mentor is project management, helping the team to work with each other, and with organization and prioritization.
Abdurrahman, Sanjay, Rex, Ted, and Sebastian have been working together for a couple of years now, and are well-practiced in teamwork, collaborating with each other, brainstorming, testing, and evaluating their ideas, part of the reason they did so well in this year’s competition.
As He notes, though the GreenR Bots-designed robot didn’t perform quite as well as those of some other teams, the GreenR Bots impressed judges with their ability to answer questions about how they came up with the idea, how it was developed and planned — easy to do, as they did all the work themselves, from beginning to end. That’s what led them to win the top honour out of the 40 teams competing.
While the team’s favourite part of all of this is having fun (sometimes there are video games involved), the kids really like solving problems, and working on the solutions; they really enjoy working, and are working really hard.
All that hard work will serve them well at the next level of competition, the FIRST Championship, in Texas from April 19 to 23. This time, there will over 600 teams competing, coming from all around the globe. The team is looking to build a better prototype before they go; to that end, and to help the team with the costs of registration, flights, and accommodation, He has set up a GoFundMe page for the GreenR Bots. Business sponsorships are also welcome; contact the Halton STEM Club via their website or email: haltonstemclub@gmail.com.
