Tourney gets kids in on the robotics game

The small band of third and fourth graders from Lowell Elementary School in the city's Olney section was not sure what to expect from their first middle school robotics competition.

Decked out in their turquoise T-shirts, the Lowell Lions pulled open the heavy doors of the University of Pennsylvania's Irvine Auditorium and entered the raucous revelry of the Philadelphia FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Lego League championship tournament Saturday.

Amid pulsing music, cheering fans, costumed students, and dancing mascots, the eight members of Lowell's mentally gifted program joined hundreds of youngsters from throughout the region who put the small, autonomous robots they had built through their paces in a game that demonstrated the students' ingenuity and programming prowess.

"It's a little more crazier and competitive than I expected," said Alan Giang, 10, a Lowell fourth grader.

"But now that we're here, we're getting used to our surroundings," added teammate Tiana Andell, 9, who is in third grade. "And we're not so nervous any more."

In its fourth year, the regional robotics competition is a joint project of Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science and the Philadelphia School District's Secondary Robotics Initiative. Velda Morris, a robotics education specialist in the district who comanages the program, said that despite snow-covered streets, 33 of the 39 registered teams had made it to the competition.

Morris, who began a robotics program at Baldi Middle School in the Northeast in 1992, helped launch a districtwide robotics initiative in 2002 with funding from the National Science Foundation and the federal Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs (GEAR-UP).

"In the suburbs you had science clubs, but you didn't have that in the school district," Morris said.

The tournament is affiliated with FIRST, a nonprofit that seeks to stimulate students' interest in science, math, engineering, and technology through competitions around the world.

"A lot of our students are interested in math and science, but they don't necessarily connect the dots of the algebra and math that they're taking with careers," said Michael Cruz, director of the district's division of college readiness. "This program really helps connect the academics with the careers through the experiences that students have here."

Youngsters ages 9 to 14 in FIRST's Lego League build small robots from Lego Mindstorms components and program their inventions to move and perform tasks without student direction. (In FIRST's high school program, students build much larger, remote-controlled robots.)

The theme of this year's middle school tournament was "Body Forward," and the robots were placed on a special game table to perform a series of medical simulations in 21/2 minutes, such as aligning a broken bone and pulling a cast into place. The teams receive points for every feat their robot completes.

Ian Weissman, a ninth grader at Great Valley High School in East Whiteland Township, was competing in his fourth and final tournament with the Raptors, a neighborhood team from Paoli.

"I think this is one of the harder years," he said, adding that he did not think many of the teams would come close to the maximum 400 points.

He and teammate Connor Jamison, a seventh grader, had a simple explanation for why they had decided to spend their time building and programming a small robot: "It's fun."

As part of the competition, student teams also spent weeks researching a body part or function and coming up with recommendations for solving medical problems. When not competing or explaining the fine points of their robots' features, students gave oral and video presentations of their projects Saturday.