St. Dominic’s ‘Dragoneers’ FIRST LEGO League team headed to Worlds in April

Pictured above: The 10 members of St. Dominic’s FIRST LEGO League “Challenge” team pose with the LEGO-built “Champion’s Award” trophy they received at a statewide tournament for best overall score in their grade division in the four areas of judging. Two of the judged areas were the design and performance of their robot, above. (Photos by Beth Donze)

By BETH DONZE
Clarion Herald

When the FIRST LEGO League (FLL) announced its 2023-24 “Innovation Challenge” to middle-school robotics teams across the world – to use technology and art to share a hobby with others – St. Dominic’s “Dragoneers” FLL team of 10 fifth, sixth and seventh graders decided to focus their project on an activity close to their hearts.

Throughout the school year, the young robotics enthusiasts have been meeting after school on Wednesdays to create an immersive “museum exhibit” they hope will promote – and demystify – their hobby of building LEGO-based robots.

Under wraps

Although team members couldn’t share too many specifics as they readied their project for an international competition to be held in April, they were able to say it involves designing a Minecraft software program that will allow museum visitors to use their own human motion to animate a robot – with the help of multi-colored sensors.

In short, the team hopes to spark interest in their hobby by showing how LEGO-based robots can mimic the way a person moves.
 
“So many people think that FLL is just for the ‘smart kids,’ or that all they do is ‘play with LEGOs,’” noted Jessica Guastella, who co-coaches St. Dominic’s team with Annette Oertling. “The students identified all the problems of why people don’t participate, and their solution was to design an immersive museum exhibit for young children that would show what FLL is all about.”

Did their research

The students created a Google survey on LEGO-based robotics and sent it to St. Dominic parents via the school newsletter. Guastella also sent the survey to her fellow FLL coaches around the world to get their input.

“Our project is about getting  more people involved in the LEGO League, so we did a survey to ask things like, ‘Do you know how to code a robot?’ ‘If you heard there was an exhibit that would teach you about coding, would you participate?’ and ‘What do most people think when they hear “FLL?”’” explained fifth-grade team member Stella Sabrio.

Guastella said the feedback from many adults was, “It’s too late for me to learn a new skill.”

“But it’s never too late! There are so many different coding languages that you can play around with,” said Guastella, noting that FLL uses a block-coding program, akin to the widely used Scratch program, that anyone can access online at no cost.

“It’s easy to learn, you’ve just got to want to learn it,” she said.

For tips on how to make their museum exhibit as family-friendly as possible, the students interviewed the director of LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) in Livingston, Louisiana, which offers tours of its gravitational-wave research and detection facility. They learned that ways to draw people into STEM exhibits include making them “multi-sided” – large enough so that families can cluster around them; designing them in a way that permits several sets of hands to interact with them simultaneously; and making them appealing to various learning styles.

The St. Dominic team members created a poster and a live skit to further explain their museum exhibit, and are fine-tuning their 3-D models on Minecraft with mentors from LSU’s Digital Media Arts and Engineering program.

Rising though the ranks

Although their museum exhibit was in an earlier phase of development at the time, the team captured the “Innovation Project Award” at last December’s Voodoo Voltage robotics match hosted by Benjamin Franklin High School, prevailing over a dozen teams in its fourth- through eighth-grade division.

However, a team’s Innovation Project is just a small part of what it takes to advance in FLL competitions. Teams are judged in three other areas: the robot itself, which members build from scratch using a kit provided by FLL and also customize with attachments and sensors that help it “walk” in various directions, push, pull and lift objects; the robot’s performance in real-time matches entailing 15 tasks or “missions”; and the team’s reflection of FLL’s six “core values” of Discovery, Innovation, Impact, Inclusion, Teamwork and Fun.

“Our robot has to go underneath the tower with a forklift attachment and push (the tower) up,” said sixth grader Sophie Crisler, explaining that the mission, called “Light Show,” is not as easy as it looks. “It has to be a very strong attachment, but it’s tall, so it tends to get jammed in the tower,” she said.

St. Dominic’s overall performance in all four areas of judging earned it the “Champion’s Award” at the Jan. 27 state championship at Jesuit, in which it competed against 60 teams in its fourth- through eighth-grade division. That impressive showing qualified the team to travel to Houston April 17-20 to take part in FLL’s “World” competition against 160 peer teams. In all, that contest is expected to draw 50,000 robotics students, coaches and chaperones from 974 clubs and 59 countries.

“We’re the only middle-school level team that’s going to the World Championships from the state of Louisiana,” Guastella said, who has coached the team since 2016.   

Young aficionados

Qualifying for international FLL tournaments is becoming par for the course at St. Dominic. Since 2006, its teams have gone to four World Festivals and three International Opens, said Oertling, who has coached at the school since 2005.

“My room’s filled with LEGOs. I’ve loved them forever,” confessed sixth grader Bennett Vega. “I just love being able to do stuff with my friends; I love being able to work on the project and research stuff; and I love working on the robot too. I love all of it!”

Sixth grader Liam Young said he is a prime example of someone who initially harbored misconceptions about LEGO-based robotics.

“At first, I thought it was just playing with LEGOs, which is our (Innovation Project’s) problem statement for this year,” Liam said. “Then I realized that it’s all about coding – and I really like coding! In this club, I can improve my coding and help the team, and I can also build LEGOs, which I love to do with my sister at home.”

St. Dominic’s FIRST LEGO League “Challenge” robotics team is composed of seventh grader Molly Clement; sixth graders Emory Brewer, Sophie Crisler, Bennett Vega and Liam Young; and fifth graders Luke Ganucheau, Piper Landry, Connor Marquez, Amy Nguyen and Stella Sabrio.

FIRST is an acronymn for “For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology,” a non-profit organization that runs various programs for young people in grades K-12. In high school, participants progress from using LEGOs to design and build their robots, to using shop materials.

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