Bots from blocks

EAST WENATCHEE — The kids of the Parkway School robotics team were nervous Saturday morning.

“We’re almost ready,” said sixth-grader Dominic Calderon as the students gathered around a table at Clovis Point Intermediate School.

“Our mission is kind of rocky right now,” added classmate Tessa Hausken. “But almost, yeah, we’re pretty close.”

“We’re almost ready,” she added.

It was Saturday, and the gym at Clovis Point Intermediate School was full of elementary school kids and middle schoolers from across central Washington, all eager to show off their skills at programming robots at a regional First Lego League robotics competition.

And Grant County was amply, if patchily, represented, with six teams from Royal and four teams from Ephrata vying to go on to the state competition in mid-January.

Including one team from Parkway School.

The Parkway kids worked hard on this, practicing for hours during and after school. They developed a presentation on ways to address global climate change in Ephrata, showed judges they were serious in how they worked together, and spent time designing their robot to compete in a number of the 14 tasks being judged that day.

Lego robots are a big deal, and hundreds of thousands of grade schoolers and middle schoolers learn to program and compete with them every year. The First Lego League uses the Mindstorm power pack and computer as the core of a customizable, programmable robot that can be assembled with ordinary Lego bricks.

The robots are then put through their paces — moving stacks of blocks, flipping and switching things, trying to cross bridges — to complete tasks in order to gain points for their team.

“We need different attachments to do different things,” Calderon said. “That’s why we kept our robot simple, so everybody made a different attachment.”

Some teams, the same two people would run their robots for the entire two and a half minutes of competition time. But not Parkway. Each team of two that made a different Lego attachment for each task the robot ran on the “mission table.”

“It should be a lot of fun,” Calderon said before the competition.

“Tournaments are about more than just programming and tech; the core values theme ensures that students also think about how they do what they do,” said Sue Kane, director of STEM programs for the North Central Educational Service District in Wenatchee. “The mantra of the day was gracious professionalism. It means competing like crazy against the clock, but treating each other with respect.”

Debra Knox, teacher and robotics coach at Parkway, said the teams competing on Saturday are judged on their “core values” as well as their presentations, their robots and how well those robots do on the assigned tasks.

“They are judged on their project. They had to research something; the project had to be about making Ephrata better,” Knox said. “The judges really listen to see how they work together.”

If robots flipped over or stalled out or otherwise failed to behave as programmed in the first, each team got two more chances to get it right.

“I think we did pretty good,” said Parkway sixth-grader Rylee Holt. “We need to work on the crane for round two.”

But in the end, none of the Ephrata teams advanced — though four of the six Royal teams are going on to the state First Lego League competition in January.

“We did almost everything we wanted to,” said seventh-grader Landon Coe, a member of the Ephrata Middle School team, after the end of the first round. “The only thing we didn’t cover was the bridge, but that was okay, we got all of our other missions done correctly and we only got one penalty token.”

There were 14 tasks on the mission table on Saturday, but EMS had managed to program for five of them, added seventh-grader Madissyn Cobb.

“All our score sheets had good scores and positive comments. We did not move onto state though. The kids are very disappointed but, they should be proud of all their work,” Knox said after the competition.

But a competition it was, complete with cheering and referees like Rob Tidd in striped jerseys.

And as a high school football referee, Tidd said he’s no stranger to competitions.

“This is my third year,” Tidd said. “I just love being here with the kids because the kids get so excited. I like it when the other team is being rooted on by the competition.”

“That’s what it’s all about,” he adds.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com.