Students Gear Up for First LEGO League Robotics State Competition
Two weeks ago, Norfolk Collegiate hosted the regional FIRST LEGO League (FLL) competition. Robotic enthusiasts from area schools and homeschools packed Collegiate to hopefully earn their place in the state competition. However, it was Collegiate’s team who took home first-place honors in Robot Design and earned a seat at this weekend’s state competition.
Students Jonas E. ’28, Cleveland J., Bea D. ’29, Sam S. ’27, Zack H. ’29, Jeremie L. ’28 and Toby W. ’29 are competing in the FLL state competition this weekend at James Madison University. If they win, they advance to national FLL competitions, and the students are hoping that their hard work over the last few months will secure their place in the national competition.
How Does it Work?
FLL presents teams with a universal theme—this year is FIRST ENERGIZE℠ presented by Qualcomm and it challenges teams to address the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal #7—that they must meet through robot design and a project. In essence, teams were challenged to find a way to ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all.
The team identified their problem: Too often children leave lights and other devices on while they are in school and away from their rooms and homes. How great would it be if there was a way to have artificial intelligence assist in regulating energy consumption when people are in the room and not in the room. For example, a child leaves to go to school and accidentally forgets to turn off their bedroom lights and fan. Instead of consuming energy with no one in the room, the technology would turn the lights and fan off or on depending on whether someone was in the room.
After polling ideas, the team decided on Jonas’ idea, which was to use artificial intelligence face recognition to detect when someone was in the room.
“In the end, Jonas’s idea to use AI just seemed perfect,” said Sam. While the group realizes the AI may not be for everyone, they loved the application that it allows and the affordability of the system that they would use, which would make it available to everyone.
The team is composed of veteran and new members, but this year they switched to Python coding, so it was a new learning adventure for all members.
“The hardest part for me was learning Python,” said Sam. “Formally I used block commands, so this year I had to acclimate to this new coding language. I’m most proud of my attachment and code for my mission. It took a long time and I put a lot of work into it, but in the end, it works great.”
Skip Morrow, the team’s advisor, agreed. “Getting the Robot Design Award was really special because the team put a lot of work into learning how to program in Python and redesigning the robot. This was just about everyone's first time using Python, and knowing that some of them are already thinking about studying engineering and computer science, this gives them some real-world practice.”
What’s Next?
This weekend the team will compete against all other regional champions throughout Virginia and Washington, D.C.
The team has been spending the time between their regional win and the state tournament finalizing and fixing the bugs they encountered in the regional competition, as well as finetuning their project.
If you haven’t seen them in action, you should!
“I wish that the community would see the real extent of our work and commitment and be able to see everything we have done,” said Sam. The team recently demonstrated the project to their middle school classmates and “we showed one-fourth of the project, and even then it was still in development, so if others saw everything that would be great.”
Their teacher and advisor Barbara Sutelan agreed.
“The team demonstrated gracious professionalism, which is one of the core values of FIRST when they hosted the regional tournament at Norfolk Collegiate,” she said. “They cheered on other teams during all of their rounds of robot games, and while the teams were waiting for the final results, our team and Collegiate volunteers lead the crowd with cheers for a job well done by everyone. Everyone–competitors, families and friends–had the spirit!”
Good luck in states, Oaks! We’re so proud of you!
