This Saturday, my 4th grade daughter competed in the qualifying competition for her region's FIRST LEGO League, the LEGO robotics organization that blends science, programming, and technology into a compelling team sport. I felt sad that she'd put in all that effort and would leave empty-handed, for the odds were strongly against her team: the elementary teams competed on the same level as the middle schoolers, the home-schooler teams had far more time to devote to their projects than the public schoolers, her elementary teachers and teammates had never participated before, and they started a mere eight weeks ago, against the year-long preparation of many teams.
Yet her Purple Sage Riders got called up for a first-place award and were placed in the half of teams selected to move on to the next level of competition. Amazing! The award they won was for their research project and presentation, which was to have them find compelling applications for robotics development. Their design? A robot to assist those with physical limitations in obtaining items on high store shelves. My daughter pushed for this topic, motivated by memories of watching her grandmother struggle to reach things while leaning for support on her walker. The second-place research award also went to an accessibility project, where another elementary team designed a robot to help one of their disabled classmates to make it to a playground area that was inaccessible before.
This theme of shaping technology to serve humanity will continue next year: they announced the topic as being biomedical engineering, using robotics in the human body itself to solve problems and limitations. Go, Riders! :-)
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