Students Rise to the STEM Challenge in New Robotics Program
There’s an exciting new learning opportunity underway for the 7th and 8th grade students at Twin Oaks this fall with the launch of our inaugural year of Lego robotics!
The program is comprised of two components–a Thursday morning exploratory class involving all of our 7th and 8th grade students and a Thursday afterschool club for some of these same middle school students. The dream of bringing a STEM program, such as robotics, to our middle school classes has become a reality.
The program is being led jointly by TOCS middle school teachers Mrs. Traci Runge and Mrs. Janna Hickel and is being supported extensively through a partnership with Westminster’s Cyborg Cats robotics team through the involvement of three senior members of their team. These WCA seniors are donating their Faith in Action service hours to support the Thursday morning class and Cyborg Cats alumnus Carter Hickel is helping to lead the afterschool club.
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During the Thursday morning class, students have been learning basic robotics construction and coding skills through a curriculum written by FIRST Robotics. What contagious excitement swept through the robotics lab the day the students first made their robots light up and move! FIRST Lego League designs a series of missions each school year around a central theme. This year’s theme has to do with various sources of energy and their delivery to consumers. Once students have learned the basic robotics construction and coding skills through the class curriculum, FIRST asks them to design and build their own robots to complete the various missions on that year’s game field. There is a considerable amount of strategy involved in choosing which of the missions to attempt to complete within the two-and-a-half-minute time limit for the game.
While all of the students are working in peer groups to design, build, and code a robot, our afterschool club students will have the opportunity on December 10 to take their robot to a FIRST Lego League competition where they will compete against other middle school students from around our area for the opportunity to advance to a regional competition. Through this program, our students are not only learning designing and coding skills but also how to work effectively as a team, how to strategize, and how to iterate a product to maximize its effectiveness and efficiency. Watching talents and strengths that are not used and seen in a traditional middle school classroom shine through in our students in the robotics lab has been a rewarding experience for the teachers just as seeing moving robots has been an exciting one for our students.
