Innovation meets robotics in STEM challenge

Lego, robotics and jellyfish came together in a clash of engineering, programming and fashion for 1st Oyster Bay Scout Group.

For the second year, the Group assembled a team of 10 Cub Scouts and Scouts, coached by Venturer Scout Cooper Everall, for the First Lego League.

Scout Leader and coach Lianne Moller said there are many similarities between Scouts and First Lego League, with both being youth-led programs with a focus on positive values.

“There are four components the teams are judged on – behaviour, in terms of values, which aligns really well with Scout values,” she said.

“It has a robot game – the teams design a robot, which goes on a competition table with problems to solve and items to interact with. The kids have a couple of months to design a robot to solve the problems.

“They also have an innovation project. This year’s theme was Submerged, so it needed to relate to the ocean. They designed posters and had to do a presentation on it. The judges were particularly impressed with this, as they thought through not only how to solve the problem, but also how to solve the problem caused by their solution.

“Their problem was jellyfish as an invasive species and multiplying due to the acidity of the ocean increasing, favouring jellyfish over fish. They decided they need to harvest the jellyfish, but also thought about what to do after you harvest them. They talked to marine biologists and fertiliser experts on how to turn them into fertilisers.

“The fourth component is explaining their robot concept, why they designed it the way they did, and why they did the games the way they did. You can’t just have a robot on the table doing it but explain why they do the action. The focus is on iterative problem solving – the youth came up with a unique design for their robot that initially covered the controls. Instead of altering their design, they created a tool to access the controls without touching them.”

This year, the team came in 15th out of 28, doubling their score from last year and receiving positive feedback on their code and innovation project.

Scouts Jack Dempsey and Max Pang were technicians, working on the robot on the table. Jack said he enjoyed working on the robot game.

“They marshal you up onto two tables and you compete against another team on the table opposite you. We were both on the table working on the robot. There’s a max of four people on the table at a time.

“Next year I want to organise parts more and make sure the robots are smoother and that everyone’s familiar with everyone else’s code. And hopefully we’ll also finish up building sooner and do practise from an extra week earlier so we can drill these projects that we’ve got today.”

Max said part of their innovation project included a costume, with the group making jellyfish bucket hats for the occasion.

“Next year we need to focus on updating our robot design, because a lot of other robot designs were all-in-one, so they could have one robot design with no interchangeability, so it would just go from one task to another to get the best score possible without wasting time. So robot design is a big factor.”

Cooper, who won the Coaches Award last year, has been coaching the team because he enjoys teaching robotics. For him, it’s about seeing the younger members develop new skills and make their own decisions on how they want to approach a problem or design the robot.

“I’ve approached teaching them the skills by letting them choose the problems they would like to solve and then letting them sort of work their way through it and as they hit roadblocks they can’t pass, like any knowledge gaps they have with coding and robotics, I try to help them bridge that gap,” he said.

“One of the more difficult things with teaching was probably the time constraints we have, as we didn’t have all that much time to figure out the activities. I would have liked to put more time to do it, but the board only comes out a couple of months before, so we only get so many sessions with the actual board itself.

“My goal for next year is to get them to use a couple more sensors. I’m looking mostly at a distance sensor. One of the problems we had this year was distance and getting things to line up properly, so with a distance sensor we can get them to line up a lot more. Also seeing if we can get a couple more activities done per run, instead of one activity per run.

“I find Lego League fun – if you like robotics, you’ll like it. Lego League is good because it uses Lego instead of actual metal. When you make a robot out of metal, if you make something wrong you have to go cut a whole other thing out and it takes a couple of weeks. But with the Lego ones, you can just put in other parts. It makes it very easy to make a robot while also having fun instead of doing actual robotics.

“I like how well the team has done, especially this time. We did better than we did last time, and that’s pretty much what I’m most proud of. They did a good job.”

Next year the Group hopes to have a senior competition team and a junior team take part.