Sixth-grade students Gary Misko, left, and Michael Miranda of St. Matthew School’s robotics club prepare a robot to hoist a Lego dog on the morning of Jan. 24. JACK MURTHA/STAFF EDISON — Before the next big thing leaves its mark on society, the innovators of tomorrow must walk many different paths. And some of those roads are made of Lego pieces.
The St. Matthew School robotics club allows students in fourth through eighth grade to design, build and program robots that complete a wide range of missions in a bizarre Lego world. From inciting mock tsunamis to rescuing plastic people, the club members work together to get the job done, said Marge Hermitt, a parent who coaches Team Shamrocks, one of the club’s two divisions.
“This gives the students an opportunity to delve into science, technology and mathematics, because they have to do calculations in order to program their robot,” she said. “It’s at a very basic level, but you have to start somewhere.”
In its second year, the club has found success in the seven members of Team Shamrocks, who recently won a research award in a FIRST Lego League (FLL) regional competition. The victory earned the group an invitation to battle 60 rival teams in a statewide contest on March 8 at Mount Olive High School, Morris County.
This year, the FLL called upon participants to use robots to overcome the fury of Mother Nature, Hermitt said. The Shamrocks focused on avalanches.
Eighth-grader John Hermitt said he and his peers learned about avalanches and the devastation they can cause. Through their research, the youngsters discovered that avalanche victims typically face a lack of oxygen, freezing temperatures and a snow-ridden burial.
After attending an event at Princeton University, the students came up with the idea for a blanket doused in hydrogen peroxide and yeast to produce oxygen and heat for those in such a jam.
The award-winning vision would not have come without the help of all the teammates, John said.
“We incorporate all of our ideas to try to make the big picture happen,” he said. “It was a good feeling, once all our hard work paid off.”
Still, the Shamrocks had to demonstrate their robotic know-how to impress the FLL judges. Their device — dubbed Scorpio because of its scorpion-like claw — carried out several tasks programmed by the students, John said.
Squads have fewer than three minutes to carry out as many assignments as possible during FLL events. But the work begins long before the robots hit the arena.
Gary Misko, a sixth-grader at the Catholic school, said he enjoyed testing the bots to see if they could live up to his expectations. For example, Scorpio can now grab a Lego dog, thanks to the undying commitment of the team members, he said.
“We didn’t have this idea until the end of the first tournament. The hook could never pick up the dog, but we worked and figured out that another piece would,” Gary added.
Challenges posed by robotics offer club members the chance to gain new skills while having a good time with their pals, St. Matthew School Principal Eileen Sullivan said.
“The big push in education is to use technology,” she said. “This is geared toward kids, but it’s getting them to problemsolve, to work together to come up with a solution to something, and to create something.”
The activities serve as baby steps into the lucrative world of STEM — science, technology, engineering and mathematics, Hermitt added.
While most of the pupils are too young to know which career paths they want to pursue, John Hermitt said the training would prove useful in a world that increasingly relies on automation.
“There’s so much new technology in the world, to the point where everything is probably going to [involve] robots soon,” he said. “This is a good way to start teaching younger kids how robots work, and it’s pretty fun, too.”
Fourth-graders Simone Stephen and Raymond Zebrowski, fifth-grader Antonio Idioma, and sixth-graders Michael Miranda and Alicia Siegel all belong to Team Shamrocks.