At Watsessing, mentor Malachi Williams observes a robot maneuver
A robotic pilot program is currently underway at Watsessing and Oak View elementary schools. Oak View Principal Linda Lo said the initiative developed following a visit to her school by the Bloomfield High School Robotic Team, under the direction of teachers Michael Warholak and Po Chen.
A collaborative effort ensued between Kerwith Lewis, the district supervisor of science, STEM and industrial arts, and Lo. Robotics team members would be mentors in an afterschool program. Lo credited the high schoolers for making the pilot program happen: They thought there should be more interaction between themselves and the younger students.
“They wanted to give back to the elementary schools,” she said.
Lo asked Shamshadeen Mayers, the Watsessing principal, to come on board and in late October, mentors and robot body parts arrived at both schools. On Wednesday afternoons, robots would be built and programmed and a robotics competition between the schools would be planned at Watsessing, tentatively on April 5.
To launch the pilot program, students were selected to participate after an application process. Some had previous robotic and programming experience. The advisors to the clubs are Margaux Lynam, a sixth-grade math and science teacher, at Oak View, and Sage DelCioppio, a fourth-grade inclusion teacher, at Watsessing.
The students were first introduced to bots or robots, and a coding language to communicate with the bots when built and functional. A flash drive would inject the language into the bot’s command center or brain. The bot would be given a way to grasp and carry a small object.
At Watsessing, one recent Wednesday afternoon, students were brainstorming with their mentors on how the bot could grasp, carry and drop an object? One idea was a crab bot, with pincers. Another thought: A claw crane like one used in arcades to pick up prizes.
The competition between the schools would determine a bot’s efficiency. The coding language the novices used did not require them to type out every command. It was a simplified version called block coding and was taken from a free programming language website called Scratch. The body parts were from VEX robotic kits which are similar to LEGO pieces, however, with moving body parts. VEX produces an array of educational robotic kits for all grades, from pre-K to college. At Watsessing and Oak View, club members were fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders.
Lynam, the Oak View advisor, said she had knowledge of block coding and elementary robotics, but the pilot venture would be a learning experience for her, too.
“Most of these kids have experience with Scratch,” she said.
At Oak View, the kids encountered an interesting problem. Some VEX kits had instructions for older kits.
“They’re doing a ton of trouble-shooting if there’s a mis-match,” Lynam said. “A big part of this is building in groups.”
She said the pilot activity was an opportunity for students, who were not in a gifted and talented program at the school, to be introduced to STEM. Students in a gifted and talented program also use a different robotics kit, called Ozobot, she added.
“It’s not necessarily coded with block coding,” she said. “You can use different colors to program commands. It’s really cool. The robot senses colors for commands.”
But block coding will prepare the students for middle school robotics, she said.
At Oak View, 19 students were involved on three teams. At Watsessing, there were 14 students on two teams. At Oak View, the mentors were Jake Lo, a junior, Micah Gonzalez, a sophomore and Adriana “Cricket” Donovski, a senior. At Watsessing were sophomores Malachi Williamson, Jacob Ortiz and Bushi Rahama, and senior Aydin Jones.
Watsessing Principal Mayers said he and Lo planned the pilot together. “At different times, we’d touch base,” Mayers said. “At the end, we’ll assess and evaluate how it went. My interest in this is that robotics, at some point, will become the future of the American economy.”
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