Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Staff photo: Kevin Wilson Allie Berg, right, programs her First Lego League group’s robot as Zachary Koegl watches Thursday evening at the warehouse of the Food Bank of Eastern New Mexico. The group builds a robot with a supplied kit and programs it to perform small tasks on a pre-designed course.
link Staff photo: Kevin Wilson
Allie Berg, right, programs her First Lego League group’s robot as Zachary Koegl watches Thursday evening at the warehouse of the Food Bank of Eastern New Mexico. The group builds a robot with a supplied kit and programs it to perform small tasks on a pre-designed course.
Staff writer
Piece by piece, four groups of students in Clovis are getting ready for a state competition. Or, as they call it, a coopertition.
The students in grades 4-8 are getting ready for the First Lego League, and state finals scheduled for Dec. 20 in Los Alamos.
The FLL, a combined effort between Lego and US FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), requires students build robots using purchased Lego kits and program them to complete small tasks on a standard playing surface.
Adults act as project supervisors and can help students understand instructions, but cannot aid in building or programming.
Ian Allison, one of the group supervisors, meets with his group Thursday evenings at the back of the Food Bank of Eastern New Mexico, where he works during the day as warehouse manager and program director.
“I’m getting to help them have a lot of fun,” Allison said. “I wish I had something like this when I was a kid.”
Each evening begins with one of the kids writing down the league’s core values: Having fun, teamwork, giving people the benefit of the doubt, gracious professionalism, teamwork and coopertition.
The final core value is the piecing of cooperation and competition, as a reminder that cooperation is the most important aspect.
“It downplays competition,” Allison said. “You’re only competing against the problem. Everybody solves problems together. You see someone else solve the problem, you’re successfully learning as well.”
Programming for the group fell into the hands of Allie Berg. A fifth-grader at Clovis Christian Schools, Berg said she first heard about the First Lego League when she took a summer STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) course with the Girl Scouts. She learned the basics of programming in that course, and she was nominated by the group to do the same for their robot, technically named Bayman 2.0 and nicknamed Pickles.
“I think the most difficult part is really going into (the programming website),” said Berg, whose 9-year-old brother Nate also belongs to the group. “You have all of these controls, but it takes forever for it to receive the correct commands.”
Some tasks include having the robot go around a series of obstacles or pushing a miniature ball into a goal.
The obstacles are created using Lego kits purchased for each group through Cannon Air Force Base sponsorship. The kits, including all of the pieces, robotics equipment and access to the online programs, run about $1,000.
Vincent Hinojosa, 13, joined the league because his 9-year-old sister Yvonne wanted to participate. He said he was enjoying the work.
“It’s definitely more fun than I thought,” Vincent said. “We’ve come a long way since we started.”
The student groups are judged on obstacle course performance and robot design (one-sixth each), but mostly on project presentation and how they demonstrate core values during the competition and interviews (one-third each).
