Middle School Robotics Team Takes on Challenge

To hear the middle school students involved tell it, the "task matrix" for April's Middle School Technology Design Challenge sounded a bit like something from "Mission Impossible"—you can almost hear a voice telling the students about their mission, should they choose to accept it.

But in the realm of Legos and robotics, it turns out the tasks the students selected were more like "mission possible."

The items challenged the students to build and program a self-operating robot that would follow a line on a table, or push cans, maybe occasionally play a tune or trip a domino line to fall.

"We just wanted to incorporate as many of these things as possible," Andrew Tu said, looking at the matrix.

So the students, along with others in the middle school's Lego robotics club supervised by teachers Susan Cooper and Sean Convery, built a Rube Goldberg-like set featuring one robotic device, launched with a hand clap, traveling by wire to a post, where it knocks a marble loose; which follows a track down to bump into and start a robotic vehicle that ... well, watch the video.

Cooper said along the way the students learned a lot about cooperative efforts and sharing, but they also learned a great deal more about programming, robot assembly, engineering and planning—mostly from each other.

"People will say to me, 'You've got all the bright kids,' and I tell them I don't tech them anything they use (for the challenge)—they mentor off each other," Cooper said.

She maintains her job is primarily administrtive: locating grants to fund the materials needed, writing specifications for the grants, making sure there are enough materials, etc.

Cooper said much of this year's progrm was funded by a grant from the Warren Township Education Association PRIDE in Education grant program.

The challenge event, which was held April 2 at Bridgewater-Raritan Regional High School, provides the students with criteria to meet for two challenges. The information is distributed in January, giving the kids 12 weeks to design, build, test, rebuild and retest their robots.

And there's the freeform entry, which offers the matrix of tasks to accomplishment with few guidelines on how to do it.

The students first went about creating the robots in teams, but student Kunwoo Park said that didn't work out too well.

"At the beginning we were going to be in teams, but that kind of got disorganized—so we kind of all worked together," he said.

The event is a challenge, not a competition, so there's not a trophy or ribbon for the students to show off, but if you ask an eighth-grader for words of wisdom for next year's challenge, you'll hear the rewards of participating in the project.

"Get an earlier start," Andrew said, adding it takes more time to build the circuit boards running the robots than students might initially realize.

Andrew Lamy offered this pearl for the ages: "Measure correctly." 

Warren Middle School has been represented at 14 of the approximately 15 such events, which has been organized by the Somerset County superintedent of schools office for middle school in Somerset, Hunterdon and Warren counties.