Building Lessons: Target Range students take Lego Robot Competition
Touching the structure gingerly, Julia Michels explains one of the more difficult tasks for her team's Lego robot. The students from Target Range School recently competed in the first Lego League Nano Quest and beat 26 other teams to win the Montana Title.
Little things count, especially when you're learning how to manipulate molecules.
A team of Target Range Elementary School sixth-graders took that lesson to heart last week when they won the state Lego League Nano Quest in Bozeman. Their patience, precision and passion for getting things right saw them through a 10-hour competition against 30 other school teams.
Lego League tournaments are relatively new in the student competition realm. Recent improvements in small-scale computers and robotics have made it possible for children's toys to accomplish tasks previously left to NASA engineers.
Target Range sixth-grade teachers Kaye Ebelt and Jann Clouse landed a grant to buy the robots and computer components for their school last year.
Target Range's top team named itself the Stampeding Nano Nerds. It featured sixth-graders Rachel Dickson, Jared Halvorson, Julia Michels, Lauren Murphy and Eric Windell.
The contest takes place on a large table marked with zones where different missions must take place. The students preprogram their robot to accomplish each mission with a set of movements and actions. The programming takes a finicky level of precision.
For example, to get around obstacles on the way to a mission, the students originally tried ordering their robot to run in a certain direction for a specific number of seconds, make a precise turn and run the next line for another length of time.
“Then we found out that if our batteries weren't fully charged, all the movements were wrong,” Halvorson said. “If the power was down, it ran too slow and wouldn't hit the target. So we switched to wheel rotations.”
That meant calculating the relative turning movements of inside and outside wheels, because the former make more rotations during a turn than the latter. As the challenges got more complex, the students started seeing more and more connections to their other subjects.
“Today in science, our teacher was talking about the graphite in our pencils,” said Dickson. “I got to thinking of Bucky Balls (a carbon molecule shaped like a geodesic dome with unusual structural properties) and wondering if that might make the lead in automatic pencils less likely to break when you drop them.”
All of the Nano Quest mission themes are based on concepts of nanotechnology, a science of molecular-level materials construction and manipulation. For instance, individual molecules of medicine might be encased in molecular tubes and delivered directly to the dangerous cells of a cancer tumor. The students replicated that action with their robots, directing them with optical and touch sensors to pick up one white Lego out of a field of red ones.
“These are the jobs they'll have someday,” said Mark Halvorson, Jared's father and one of the Stampeding Nano Nerds' coaches. “They're finding out how the doctors of the future will start diagnosing people's problems.”
The Bozeman competition involved oral presentations and overall team sportsmanship, as well as top-performing robots. Target Range's sixth-grade team won both the Champion's Award and Performance Award in Bozeman.
Right behind them were the Target Range fifth-grade Nano Docs with a second-place finish in the Champion category. Nano Docs members were Jeremy Bezdicek, Jason Riekena, Jaydn Wilson, Matt Rossmiller, Robell Bassett, Jacob Harris, Jiah Turner, Jeremy White, Dennis Fuss and Josh Meader.
Now, the Stampeding Nano Nerds have to solve a more immediate problem. They must raise $10,000 in less than a month to attend the First Lego League World Festival in Atlanta, Ga., where they are invited to represent the state of Montana on April 12-14.
By Rob Chaney - Missoulian
Anyone interested in helping sponsor the team's journey can send donations to:
Target Range Connection
c/o Sherry Murphy
8265 Double Tree Lane
Missoula, MT 59804
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http://www.missoulian.com/articles/2007/03/10/news/local/news02.txt