Patch Maplewood, NJ --Aliea Nalbani and Olivia Elliott, students at Jefferson School, competed against students from Maplewood, South Orange and Summit in this weekend's Robotics Spring Fling at South Orange Middle School to win one of the two main competitions.
The girls were part of a team from Robot Revolution, a program founded by local parents Darin Czukoski and Chris Marbaix's to teach elementary and middle school students how to create and program real robots, using the Lego Mindstorms robot. The school launched only this past September with 18 students. By the winter session, the number of students swelled to 42.
Locally, classes take place at Sparkhouse Kids in South Orange Village. (There are also classes at Mondo in Summit and Doodlebugz in Madison.)
Kids can learn several kinds of skills: from reasoning (inductive and deductive analysis, strategic and critical thinking), soft skills (such as leadership, perseverance, project management, work ethics, problem solving, team work) and hard skills (including applied mathematics and physics, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and computer science). The classes are based on curriculum from Carnegie Mellon University.
"We look forward to holding this competition again next year and hope that local FLL (First Lego League) teams will join us in greater numbers," said Marbaix.
The students, ranging from third to sixth grades, designed, built and programmed their robots over the previous several weeks, and then competed for the best score out of three rounds on Saturday. Their robots had to perform certain tasks within a small window if time, clocked on a stopwatch. Reported by Patch 1 hour ago.