After winning a statewide robotics competition, a team of Bangor and Brewer students will compete against schools from across the country in the national championship.
Earlier this month, a group of eight homeschooled 3rd to 7th graders won the statewide FIRST LEGO League Competition in Farmington. That achievement earned them an invitation to the national championship, which is taking place in Houston in April.
Now, the students and their families are hoping to raise the nearly $7,000 they need to travel to Texas to represent Maine in the contest. The team’s online GoFundMe had gathered $995 as of Tuesday evening.
If they succeed, the team, called Lego Legends 32423, will face more than 200 teams of middle schoolers from across the country, said Sagar Deshpande of Brewer, one of the team’s three coaches and a parent of a student on the team.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime experience for the kids to go to the national competition,” Deshpande said.
Registration for the multi-day competition alone costs $2,000, Deshpande said, in addition to the added expenses of travel, accommodation and meals for each student and their parents. Altogether, Deshpande said the four-day event could cost the families roughly $24,000.
“All the kids are ready to give up their upcoming Christmas and birthday gifts for this competition,” Deshpande said. “That’s how dedicated they are.”
Additionally, because the team is comprised entirely of students who are homeschooled, the group’s expenses are funded by the families, though Brewer High School gives them a place to meet and practice, Deshpande said.
In each tournament, the students must build a robot using LEGO pieces and program it to complete a series of set tasks within 2 minutes and 30 seconds, Deshpande said. Students earn points based on how many tasks their machine does.
Each contest also has an “innovation” component where students are challenged to solve a real-world problem using robots.
This year’s innovation section had an ocean theme, so the Bangor and Brewer students researched how robotics could easily identify bycatches in commercial fishing so they can be released, Deshpande said.
A bycatch is a fish or other marine animal that gets caught unintentionally when fishermen are looking to catch a certain type of fish.
The group then built a prototype of a machine that could sort out unwanted catches using the information they gathered from sources like the Maine Maritime Academy and Wooshh Innovations, a Washington-based company that manufactures a machine that uses artificial intelligence to identify and release bycatches.
Students are also given 10 minutes to give a presentation to the judges explaining their reasoning behind building their robot and programming it the way they did. This, Deshpande said, helps build their confidence and presentation skills.
The team has changed in size as students age out of the program, as children older than 14 aren’t allowed to compete in the middle school section of LEGO robotics tournaments, Deshpande said. Some students, like 12-year-old Aarav Jain, have been on the team for five years, while others joined the group in the last year.
Jain said he joined the team after watching his older brother participate.
“I wanted to follow my brother’s footsteps in robotics and learn more about what this team truly is and what it’s capable of,” Jain said.
Esha Sathyanarayanan, 10, of Bangor said she has most enjoyed learning how to code because of the variety of ways the skill is useful.
“When you get older and more advanced, you can even code actual robots made of metal,” Sathyanarayanan said. “That’s really interesting to me because robots are the future.”
While parents agreed they’re proud to see their children learning coding and engineering skills that could shape their future careers, they’re also pleased their students are learning to work together with others to achieve a common goal and become more confident.
“It’s good for them to learn how to work together now because in life, they’re going to need it,” said Jennifer Boothroyd.
Boothroyd said she’s also pleased with how the competition emphasises fun and inclusion. This creates a culture where students support each other and feel they can contribute to the team based on their individual strengths.
Navneet Jain, said the robotics team helped his older son come out of his shell and strengthened his public speaking skills. Now, he’s watching the same transformation in his younger son, Aarav Jain.
“We are so incredibly proud of all of them,” Jain said. “They are shining.”
