While the high school teams in the 2012 FIRST Robotics competition built basketball-playing bots, their younger counterparts in the FIRST Lego League (FLL) faced off in the Food Factor Challenge?an educational initiative on food safety disguised as a three-part competition.
The challenge began at the start of the school year, as FIRST developed a partnership with the Polytechnic Institute at New York University (NYU-Poly) to place graduate students in local classrooms to teach science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) principles through robotics. The NYU-Poly grads used NXT software, a simple drag-and-drop interface, to teach the elementary and middle-school-aged kids in FLL how to program tiny, autonomous Lego robots that would compete in the FLL challenge.
"[FLL] is more about providing students with access," said Ben Esner, the director of the Center for K-12 STEM Education at NYU-Poly. "In a text-driven curriculum, they don?t get many opportunities to experiment with robotics and explore STEM disciplines."
The FLL competition consisted of several parts, only one of which was the Lego robot competition, which PM saw teams compete in at the New York FIRST Robotics regional this past weekend. Teams of 10, with only two students allowed next to the table at one time, maneuvered their bots around a tabletop course; typical missions included "harvesting" corn and avoiding "bacteria" in order to preserve food and prevent contamination. The student teams were given two and a half minutes to score as many points as possible with the more difficult tasks, such as loading and reversing a Lego trailer truck into a dock, being worth more points.
In addition to programming the Lego-bots, the students also worked on a long-term research project guided by their NYU-Poly mentor. The RoboTigers team, comprised of second and third graders from Manhattan?s PS3 Elementary School, researched ways to prevent the spread of listeria bacteria in cantaloupe. The students found that the best way to get safe cantaloupes is to grow and monitor them yourself. They even measured the dimensions of their school?s roof and created a miniature display of a proposed rooftop garden.
At the Urban Assembly Institute of Math and Science for Young Women in Brooklyn, NY, an all-girls team of seventh and eighth graders researched differences between organic and non-organic tomatoes. Their findings: While non-organic lasted longer, organic were the healthier option.
"Organic tomatoes are better for you because they have flavonoids," thirteen year-old Giselle O?Brady explained. "Those are powerful antioxidants that are really good for you." Based on their research, the girls even came up with an idea for an iPad application called "Tele-Mato"?a way to monitor tomatoes via web-connected sensors in the ground.
The joint FIRST?NYU-Poly program reached 23 New York City schools this year, exposing over 2000 students to STEM education principles through robotics. And while the Lego bots definitely garnered the largest cheering section at FLL, it was clear by the numerous project presentation rehearsals going on in the background that the students were really dedicated to their research.
"In our experience, different young people excel at different aspects of FLL," Esner said. "Which is part of what makes it such an effective and engaging program."
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