Students from around Long Island tested their programming mettle at a large Lego robotics tournament at Mineola High School this weekend.
Hundreds of students representing over 60 teams attended the FIRST Lego League competition, which challenged the students to build robots to complete preset obstacles. Two teams from Mineola Middle School participated.
“It was a great turnout,” Mineola superintendant Michael Nagler said. “This is the first competition by a Nassau school.”
Ronit Setia, a seventh grader at Mineola Middle School, said he and his team worked on their robot every day at lunch and twice per week after school leading up to the competition.
In the end, it won them sixth place, he said.
“It did pretty well,” Setia said of the robot. “We did pretty good, because we’re a rookie team.”
The teams, each comprising up to 10 students, received points based on how well their robot succeeded in performing tasks such as spinning a wheel, picking up a key and throwing a ball over a barrier.
Nagler served as a judge for the competition.
“I was very impressed with the ingenuity of the kids and their problem solving skills,” he said. “It’s very sophisticated; it’s a lot of programming.”
The teams each build a robots from a kit of more than 100 Lego parts, then program the “brick” or brain of the computer to sense its environment and complete objectives, said Ken Coy, a teacher at Mineola Middle School and the coach for the team.
“There was a lot of variation in the robots,” he said. “We used tractors. Other teams used wheels.”
Coy said more than 15,000 teams participate in the competition throughout the world.
“It’s really a huge coordinated competition,” he said.
Nagler said the competition fits into the district’s STEM – short for science, technology, engineering and math – curriculum.
Setia, who was one of his team’s primary coders, said he enjoys those subjects and hopes to participate again.
“It was really fun to see it run,” he said. “I’m into technology and computers, so I thought programming was fun.”
