Brick bots blazed trails at the annual NorCal FIRST LEGO League Silicon Valley Championship in Morgan Hill Sunday, Jan. 28.
The FIRST LEGO League (FLL) event, in partnership with the nonprofit Playing at Learning, boasted more than 300 attendees cheering on 32 local robotics teams at Ann Sobrato High School in Morgan Hill.
Although the Ann Sobrato robotics team did not compete this year, Principal Courtney Macko said its robotics club, started by former instructor Peng Yav, has hosted the championship over the past few years. Yav worked with other area schools and Playing at Learning to begin hosting the robotics tournament.
“Everyone was very supportive, including our administration, the district, and the Live Oak Foundation which helped to provide a grant for $1,000 for our team,” Yav said.
Macko is excited about the collaborative work being done by the school and Playing at Learning.
“We are hopeful this partnership with Playing at Learning will spur our club to compete in future events,” Macko said.
Founded in 1989, the FIRST is an international nonprofit organization that aims to inspire young people from kindergartners to 12th-graders to pursue STEM-related careers. Its name is an acronym centered on those ideals to further innovation: For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology.
With nearly 600 teams and three districts in northern California, Playing at Learning hosts a championship for each district including Peninsula district, Capitol district, and one here for the Silicon Valley district.
Each year FLL competitors—teams of students in fourth through eighth grade—are tasked with designing, building and programming an autonomous robot whose mission is tied to a real-world theme.
This year’s theme focused on hydrodynamics. Each team was required to identify a problem within the human water cycle and design an autonomous robot that offered a solution.
FLL Program Coordinator, Neta Retter said the teams are judged based on their project and how they exhibit core values.
Retter said “Coopertition,” a term coined by FIRST, emphasizes its core values of collaborative teamwork and friendly competition.
“One of the things they are judged on is how well they work together and problem solve as a team,” Retter said.
Teams are judged on their robot design and their presentation to the judges—highlighting how they developed their code and their process involved in developing the bot, said Retter.
“One team made a circuit that screams at you if your faucet is leaking for more than a minute,” said Retter. “Their goal was to attack leaky water usage. There were a lot of teams focused on water recapture and other grey water usage.”
With as many as 10 members per team, these students learn first and foremost to work together, generate new ideas and think constructively about STEM fields.
“This event provides a great opportunity to generate excitement in a rapidly growing field,” Macko said.
