21st Century Learning: Sonoma County Robotics Challenge

Author: Rick Phelan
Published: 03.21.14

Students with Robots Students in grades 4-8 will demonstrate 21st century thinking skills and abilities with intricate robots they’ve constructed to compete in the Sonoma County Robotics Challenge. Scheduled for Saturday, May 3, 8:45am-2:00pm, at Elsie Allen High School, this year’s event will feature seven different events. Events for beginner through advanced robot designers include:

Drag Racing: Students race robots on a track that is 16-feet long with a goal of beating their opponents to the finish line.
Sumo: Robot sumo wrestling is a contest where two robots try to push each other out of a circular ring. The last robot in the ring wins.
Free Form: The Free Form event challenges teams to make robots that follow a planned script of actions related to an annual theme. This year’s theme is “soccer.” Entries are judged on the difficulty of tasks, adherence to the script, and connection to the theme.
Shot Put: This challenge requires students to think of the Track and Field event known as the Shot Put. Contestants design robots that enter a “shot put ring” and throw a ping-pong ball. The winning robot is the one that throws the ball the greatest distance.
Off Road Racing: Off Road Racing involves a 16-foot long course with blocks of wood placed at different intervals. The object is to overcome the barriers, stay on track, and finish with the best time.
Bull Dozer: This event takes place in a 4-foot by 4-foot space with 8-ounce soda cans filled with sand. Competitors must design robots that detect the cans and bull-doze them to marked “target areas.” Robots earn points by pushing the cans to the target areas in the least amount of time.
Programming Challenge: New this year is a programming challenge for participating students. It involves finding and fixing bugs in a Lego NXT-G program, then loading the program onto a provided robot so that it completes a Sort the Bricks activity with the best time.

The goal of the Sonoma County Robotics competition is to engage elementary and middle school students in applying mathematics, science, engineering, critical thinking, teamwork, and oral presentation skills through robotics activities. Students use Lego Mindstorm kits to design and build robots that respond to the challenges. The Lego kits contain bricks, plates, beams, pins, axles, wheels, motors, sensors, and a smart “programmable” brick. Students learn to create programs that are loaded into the programmable brick. To support this, Carnie Mellon University and Lego have created computer programming languages that run on popular computer operating systems and are accessible through a graphical user interface.

Students carry out many trial-and-error activities to find the best challenge solutions. The processes that students use in this work are similar to the work of real-life engineers: brainstorming solutions, designing prototypes, evaluating prototypes, and refining designs. Robots must work autonomously (without human control) at the competition.

Since its inception in 2003, the Robotics Challenge has reached over 2,000 students. The project meets its educational goals by actively engaging students in applying academic learning and encouraging them to think about and prepare for future careers in the technology industry.