Lego Robots Rule The World

A team of Honolulu home schoolers wins Hawaii’s robotic Lego title, and now prepares for the world championship

It just makes sense that a group named SPIDERS would know its way around “worm gears” and “caterpillar treads.”

Chalk this up to a fitting name and old-fashioned skill and teamwork: The SPIDERS - Super Powerful Intelligent Determined Energetic Robot Scientists - will be representing Hawaii at an international Lego-based robotics competition April 27 to 29 in Atlanta, known as the FIRST Lego League World Festival.

In November, the team beat out 21 public, private and home schools to win first place in robotic performance at the state tournament. In Atlanta, the team will face 80 teams from 30 countries. Teams like IMMORTAL FUTURE from Amman, Jordan; Lab Ratz from Johannesburg, South Africa; and Blue Shark from Seoul, South Korea, to name a few.

Coach Kevin Dang says his team of home schoolers, now in its second year of competition, has a lot going for it.

“Great attitudes, everyone works well together, they all have fun together, and everybody takes everyone’s constructive criticisms,” he says.

But he’s not taking anything for granted.

“I want to say we’re going to win, but you’re competing against the best of each (area). ... We’ll do the best we can. We’ll do hard to win that.”

FIRST Lego League, or FLL, announces the theme of the competition in September. This year it was Ocean Odyssey, and teams are judged on a research and presentation project of their choice, teamwork, design and robotic performance, in which a robot performs as many as nine tasks in a two-and-a-half-minute period. Lego MindStorms kits are handed out at the start of the season, and objects such as coral reefs and submarines are built to specifications, but the robot design is pretty much up to the team. Teams can add any piece to the robot “as long as it’s Lego,” says team captain Carter Lam, who served as builder and programmer.

“I work on the computer, I program what I want the robot to do, and then we download it into the RCX, which is the brain in the robot, and it runs,” he says. “If it doesn’t work we go back and make changes, and if it does, we’re really happy.”

After some training by coach Dang, a welding engineer at Pearl Harbor, on the pros and cons of things like bevel gears and worm gears, as well as tanks, two wheelers and four wheelers, team members came up with a robot that rolled on two motorized rear wheels and two tractionless front wheels. They also equipped the robot with sensors for rotation, bumper and light.

“I like being able to come in at the beginning of the day and make something out of nothing,” says 11-year-old Jake Schaffer. “Being able to just build a robot or build an attachment, and being able to tell it what to do and program it to do these tasks is something that I love.”

The coolest thing he says he built this year was a pair of arm-like attachments that made it possible for the team to do a task that no other team attempted at the state tournament - raising a series of flags to mark a shipwreck.

“Our problem was once you knocked up the flag, the flag in front of it would knock back down,” he says. “So we had to find a way to keep it up.”

After some trial and error, Schaffer found that placing the arms at the sides of the robot, one up front, one at the rear, successfully re-raises the flags as the robot passes.

“He went through a thousand different kinds of failure to get that to work,” coach Dang says, not quite sure of what to call the arms. “Squiggly? Or scrunchy? Or tentacle? I’ll just call ‘em tentacles.”

Dang is a former mentor for the now defunct Mililani High School robotics team, and he is thrilled about FLL “because it makes science and engineering fun, exciting, and hands on.” He says it also teaches youngsters

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