‘Like Legos, but harder’ — Silver Lake sixth-graders duke it out on the robot battle table
SILVER LAKE — If each of the Silver Lake Grade School sixth-graders’ robots were a collection of parts, then Friday’s engineering and design contest would be a competition to see who could most efficiently and cohesively put those parts together.
It was a Battle of the Bots, and on the line were bragging rights for the rest of their elementary school careers.
Cheers and jeers erupted from the bleachers as the students watched their classmates take on each other on the robotics table. The competitors, with remote controls tightly held, scored points by maneuvering their VEX IQ robots to shuffle blue and orange balls across a wall and bridge to their opponents’ side of the table.
Design-build process teaches Silver Lake Elementary School students to learn from failure
While the competition itself was Friday morning, the long process of designing and building the best robots they could started in October for the children. Silver Lake Elementary School computer lab teacher Becky Smith introduced the competition to the kids with lessons explaining the concepts of mechanics and simple machines, while outlining the challenge the students would have to overcome with their robots.
Students could use one of the robotics’ companies existing designs, but Smith also gave the students latitude to try their own designs. While Smith had introduced the robots to the school after receiving a foundation grant five years ago, earlier competitions had the students make their robots dance, and this year was the first on the table top, which was bought through the high school's robotics program with a separate grant.
“There are kids who just want to make that initial build and be done, but then there are also the kids who want to go above and beyond,” Smith said.
It was an often frustrating process, the students admitted. More often than not, a robot part would break or not respond to the students’ remote control inputs in the weeks of designing and building, and that would mean going back to the drawing pad.
Still, the students said they learned just as much from their failures as they did from their successes. The team of James Day, Rylin Kirkwood and Ava Alexander experimented with putting a counterweight on their robot after an earlier design often toppled over.
“They’re like Legos but harder to put together,” James said. “It’s more technical. Engineering is hard.”
Robot competition helps Silver Lake Elementary students explore programming, coding as career paths
Not every student will become an engineer or programmer. In fact, some of the students joked that he competition has completely scared them off from a field that can be extremely challenging.
But the project, like so many others in school, is about so much more than the strictly academic portion of it, Smith said.
“The robotics part is a great lesson for them, but the best part is learning to problem solve and working in a team,” she said. “I tell them every day — when they’re older and working with other people, they’ll have to get along and think through ideas.”
More importantly, it exposes the children to potential careers or interests to explore as they become older students and eventual high school graduates, Smith said. Some of the project’s most eager participants have been students who have otherwise struggled or been disengaged with school.
“(Robotics) is not something that only people in college do,” Smith said. “Grade school kids can learn and do this, and this project gives them a start, especially as we try to get more students into engineering and coding career paths.”
Rafael Garcia is an education reporter for the Topeka Capital-Journal. He can be reached at rgarcia@cjonline.com or by phone at 785-289-5325. Follow him on Twitter at @byRafaelGarcia.
This article originally appeared on Topeka Capital-Journal: Silver Lake Elementary hosts VEX IQ programming, robotics competition
