White Hill RoboCats and RoboGirls Head to Next Round of Robotics Competition

When I first heard about 's Robotics Club I thought it sounded like a nice way for like-minded kids to hang out and experiment with robotics tools -- but not much more.

Then I heard that the club's three teams had entered a robotics competition and all three had . This weekend the RoboGirls and RoboCats are off to Rocklin for the next round of competition. I have to confess I'm a sucker for this kind of news. Look what our kids did on their first try! Look how creative, smart and talented they are!

Clearly, my original conception of the club was off-base and I needed to learn more about these RoboCats and RoboGirls. Also, YES, the s Foundation, provided some funding for the Robotics Club this year — another reason to get up-to-date on its activities. So I contacted Nate MacDonald, the club leader and 6th-grade math teacher, and he invited me to join one of the club's lunch-time meetings.

When I arrived, the teams were already busy fine-tuning their robots for Saturday's event. They were also prepping their scientific research presentations, another requirement of the competition. First Lego League (FLL) -- the organization behind these tournaments -- has a mission to inspire students to pursue science and technology educations, and eventually careers. In addition to showing off their robots' skills and agility, every team must identify, research and provide a unique solution to a problem based on FLL's annual theme. 

“Honestly, robotics is really a hook to bring the kids in,” said Andrew Maley, parent and mentor to one of the RoboCats teams. “They’re really working on scientific research and critical teamwork skills.” 

This year, FLL's theme is food safety. The RoboGirls project is salmonella detection in live chickens. Salmonella can pass from an infected chicken to an egg, but it’s impossible to tell if a chicken is infected. The team’s solution: develop a feed additive that turns a chicken’s coxcomb green if it is infected with salmonella.

“The solutions may not actually be ‘implementable,’” commented the RoboGirls’ team mentor and parent Kathleen Phelps. “But each team’s solution shows a real ability to apply scientific principles while thinking outside the box.”

Maley’s RoboCats chose to look at ecoli contamination in milk, which can sneak by filtering at the dairy farm and pasteurization at the processing plant. The team found a researcher named Paul Jackson at Lawrence Livermore Labs who is experimenting with a protein that attacks e coli bacteria. They interviewed Jackson and visited the Bivalve Dairy in Point Reyes and Strauss Family Creamery in Petaluma to learn all the steps in milk processing.

MacDonald’s RoboCats team's project centers on the detection of mercury in fish, which won them the Project Presentation Award at the November competition.

While they’ve learned how to do real scientific research, the kids have also become adept at working with their robots, which are built with LEGO Mindstorms, a toolkit of sensors, wheels, gears and a computer “brain.” Each team spent a good part of the lunch session tapping away on notebook computers to refine their robot’s movements for Saturday's Robot Game competition. The Robot Game is a series of food safety-related “missions" represented by Lego models with levers and moveable items that the robot must successfully manipulate. The Lego models are set out on an eight-inch by four-inch grid called the “field.” The missions include changing storage temperature from hot to cold, pest removal and viral and bacterial hand washing. 

MacDonald used part of the YES funding to buy two regulation-sized tables and create exact replicas of the Robot Game in his classroom. After refining the programs on the notebook, someone transfers the new instructions to the robot with a memory stick. Then the robot driver starts the program running and the robot sets out to complete one of the missions.

The primary focus behind all this activity is teamwork. About ten minutes into my visit, MacDonald called the group to attention to talk about team roles – and give a quick pep talk. “Everyone on the team should have a job,” he explained to the kids. “Even if you’re not the driver or the programmer, you have a role to play and you need to own that role.” He listed jobs, including duplicate robot tester, robot carrier, battery manager, time manager, cheering squad and presentation organizer, as examples.

Then he reminded everyone to have fun. “You are already all successful not matter what happens next weekend. This competition is really a celebration of all your hard work,” he said.

As always the kids are way ahead. They've been adding fun to their hard work by designing team t-shirts and picking hats in keeping with their research project themes. The RoboGirls had just received their chicken hats and were wearing them proudly. Maley gave me sneak peek at the “cow” hats that his RoboCats team will wear.

“I’ve learned that researching and other things that normally would be considered boring schoolwork can be fun when you are with a good group of people,” said RoboCat and White Hill sixth-grader Vicent Lucido. “I think we were successful because we put a lot of work into this and we know each other really well.”