Greenville students 'think like engineers,' take on world at Lego championships in Texas

When Argent Agents represent South Carolina in Texas this month, they will put their collective ingenuity and creative power to the test. The group of six middle school students – Nicky Arzt, Lily Arzt, Jackson Champion-Wescott, Grayson Champion-Wescott, Henry Quackenbush and Benjamin Frick – won the South Carolina First Lego League State Championship in February, qualifying them for the world championship event in Houston, April 19 – 22.

Chris Arzt is the team’s coach and a parent of two of the competitors. All six team members attend the Sterling School in Greenville and they span grades 5 – 8.

The STEM-based program promotes the teamwork and critical thinking needed to complete challenges, both through the framework of First Lego and beyond. Arzt said it requires students to focus on problem-solving.

“They're teaching coding, but they're also trying to teach them to think like engineers,” he said. “How do you look at a problem and figure out how to solve it? And then when that doesn't work, how do you adjust and try again?”

Arzt said the program has three elements.

“One part is core values, where there are various values that the kids are encouraged and expected to model and deliver over the course of the season, like discovery, innovation, teamwork, fun, etc.,” he said.

Those values are incorporated throughout the practices and competitions.

“There's an innovation project,” Arzt said. “Based on the year's theme, they have to come up with some project, something that they can make better, and they have to talk to experts and try and figure out what they can do. And then the third part is the robot. They need to build a robot, program it, and there's a table and a set of missions. They need to program the robot to do this independently – like if it needs to go around the table and lift this thing up, move this thing over there and knock this thing down or whatever it is.”

At the state level, the team created a distinct robot that performed missions without motors. Arzt said most robots have motorized arms, but this team relied on passive attachments like ramps, levers and rubber bands.

“Their innovation project is to give water-powered generators to households in places with no power lines,” according to Arzt. “The family can use it to generate power using water from a rain gutter or from a river. It will generate enough power to have light at night or charge a cell phone.”

The season started in August. Throughout their practices and competitions, Arzt said he has seen the students learn to work together as a team.

“The way they step up for each other and help each other out, that's a big thing,” he said. “I think they have recognized the value of hard work. They did a lot more work this year than they did last year, and different people have gotten better at different things as well. Whether it's coding or whether it's persistence, and not giving up after something didn't work for five minutes, or whether it's how to interact with adults who you're trying to interview and get information from and write emails to, they've learned a lot of different things. There are a lot of different things involved, and some people focus more on one thing than another, so different people learn different skills. But they all learned a bit of everything.”

This article originally appeared on Greenville News: Greenville students take on the world at Lego championships in Texas