Maple Ridge News, January 22, 2020

Page 13

www.mapleridgenews.com

The Maple Ridge Pitt Meadows News

Wednesday, January 22, 2020 A13

Arts&life Meadowridge students unleash their robotic talents FIRST LEGO League competition took place at Meadowridge School Colleen Flanagan cflanagan@mapleridgenews.com

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obots can come in all different shapes and sizes. But the LEGO MINDSTORMS robots at the FIRST LEGO League competition hosted by Meadowridge School on Sunday had to be entirely student built and preprogrammed to complete a series of tasks on a pre-designed course mapped out on a table. Members of the Meadowridge robotics club participated in this years competition themed City Shaper. There were 32 teams at the event, from Grades 5 to 8, including 36 FIRST LEGO League students from Meadowridge and around seven Junior FIRST LEGO League students, Grades 2-3, who held their own demonstration. Challenges vary, explained Meadowridge robotics club coach Carrie Mohoruk, who helped organize the event.

Members of Team Etc., Grade 7 students at Meadowridge, try to perfect their robot, named Jordon, during a practice run at the FIRST LEGO League competition at Meadowridge School on Sunday. (Colleen Flanagan-THE NEWS) Delivering certain blocks into each circle gets points, if the colours match the circle there are more points on top of that and then there are some upgrade blocks gets even more points,

she said. Then if the robots are able to trigger the crane that drops a block they can get even more points, along with releasing an accessibility swing. Teams are given only two and a half

minutes to get as many points as they can. And, said Mohoruk, teams can only touch the robot in specific areas or else they lose points. There can only be two children at the table at a time to operate the robot and they have three chances to get it right. Their top score is what counts. Each team has a launch plan that they work on ahead of time that gives them the order they are doing the challenges in. You have to be careful about changing that launch plan up, said Mohoruk, because it can knock other things on the table and take away points from the team. Team Etc., made up of Grade 7 students from Meadowridge, wanted to keep their robot simple because this was their first time competing at the FIRST LEGO event. Their robot, named Jordon, took the team almost five hours to make, as they had to change the attachments numerous times to figure out what would work the best. Qianru Guo said finding a way to push the blocks with the attachment was the most challenging. Amy Xu said figuring out whether to use rotations or

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degrees to program the robot’s wheels to turn was also a challenge for the team. Xu discovered degrees is more accurate. Bella Cheung, Fiona Yang and Razaan Sayeh, each learned how to build the attachments, how they work and finding the right pieces to make up the structure of the robot. Team Zoomers, another Meadowridge team, called their robot Short Box, and made sure there were lots of holes and options available for moving attachments around. But during the three weeks they worked on their robot design they decided to focus on one versatile attachment that can be put in two places for the competition. “A lot of other teams have big boxish things that they can put on and off and we think that would take a lot of time,” said team member Grade 7 student Joshua Liu describing other teams’ attachments. In competition, even though all of the programs worked on the team’s robot, they mixed up their launch plan. Grade 8 team member Henson Han said next time they are going to be more organized. Continued on A15

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