By Kirk Starratt
It’s more about teamwork, fun and learning than competition.
However, after months of preparation, the annual Robot Programming Competition at Acadia University in Wolfville Feb. 4 were a culmination and celebration of the time and effort put in by the 30 middle school and 13 high school teams from across the province taking part.
One such team was the LEGO Lords from Kings County Academy in Kentville. The team won the trophy for the robotics competition after being the overall winner at the regional qualifier in November.
Gabriel Skaling, a 12-year-old Grade 7 student, said they had to choose a mission for their robot, build the robot and everything it uses and program all the commands.
He said the project was great because he had the opportunity to work with people who shared similar interests, get creative and build things.
“It’s not a lot of pressure,” he said. “It’s loose and a lot of fun.”
Skaling said the team worked for about two-and-a-half hours every Friday afternoon since the beginning of the school year to prepare for the qualifier and leading up to the competition at Acadia. He thinks more students would enjoy the experience if they gave it a try.
Activities foster interest in computer programming and encourage students to learn about math, science and technology, working as a team to solve practical problems using engineering and computer software. The championship competitions are co-ordinated through Acadia’s Jodrey School of Computer Sciences.
The event featured the High School Robot Programming Competition and the FIRST (For the Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) LEGO League competition, part of an international tournament for middle school teams.
The middle school teams participating at Acadia qualified at five competitions held at Nova Scotia Community College campuses in November. This year’s FIRST LEGO League competition theme was food factor and involved finding ways to avoid food contamination.
Teacher and team manager Gisele Caron said this is her first year being involved and had no idea how complex the competition is. However, there is never a sense of competition among the team members.
“The robotics competition is just part of the overall experience,” she said. “It’s great to see the boys work as a team.”
Caron and team coach Julie Skaling agreed the boys could take full credit for their accomplishments. Skaling said she couldn’t tell them what to do when it came to programming the robot because she doesn’t know.
“It’s all about them figuring it out,” she said. “Everyone’s opinion matters.”
Skaling said the boys had to come up with an innovative idea along the theme of food safety and chose the tape worm. They talked with a vet from Agriculture Canada and learned that although tape worms are no longer a serious problem here, they are in other countries with poor sanitation. The boys decided to do a skit dressed as LEGO figures on a mission to promote awareness.
Jodrey School of Computer Sciences Director Danny Silver founded the competition in 2005. The following year the school became the FIRST LEGO League partner for Nova Scotia. Silver said his intention was to inspire greater interest and understanding of possible career paths involving science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
“The country of Canada requires about 7,200 new, bright, young people in computer science and engineering every year,” he said. “We can only turn out about 5,200.”
In terms of human resources, demand outweighs supply in these fields. Silver said very few schools have the courses, resources or capability to teach digital technology.
Society, he said, honours and celebrates sports heroes and Hollywood stars but not so much talented technological innovators, including those who develop life-saving technology and otherwise empower advancement.
“My greatest desire is to allow the work the kids are doing to be less extra curricular and more mainstream,” Silver said.
Did you know?
- 325 students participated in the two robot programming competitions at Acadia. There were about 100 volunteers and about 40 coaches.
- The program has been extended to more schools through the Robot Lending Library. It has loaned 60 robots to interested Nova Scotia groups since March 2011.
- High school teams develop robot hardware and computer software to tackle challenging problems developed at Acadia that require sensing and moving objects in partially known environments.
- Middle school teams in the FIRST LEGO League Food Factor Challenge research, build and program robots to explore ways food can become contaminated. Teams propose solutions for preventing and combating contamination. As part of the competition, each team gets three runs on the course for robot performance, with their best score of the three being recorded.
- The overall winner or champion of the FIRST LEGO League was E.I.J. from the Falcon Academy of Robotics in Bedford.
- The overall winner of the high school competition was from Charles P. Allen High School from Bedford.
