DECATUR — FIRST Lego League competitions can be a little overwhelming if you don’t know what to expect, particularly at the state level.
“It’s like going to Comic-Con for the first time,” said Liz Bartimus, the coach for the Johns Hill Magnet School group. “That’s pretty much the only way I can describe it.”
Johns Hill and Dennis School are both headed to state competition on Jan. 27 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
FIRST Lego League is, on the surface, a robotics competition. Students design and build a robot that has specific tasks to do based on that year’s theme and game board. Johns Hill’s team has five students who can write programs when most teams have two or three at most. However, there’s far more to it than that.
Robotics is important, but the real mission of the organization is for young people to learn life skills as they build their science and technology knowledge.
Students learn and practice core values that include teamwork, the spirit of friendly competition, “gracious professionalism” and the idea that what they learn is more important than if they win. And they should display their core values every moment during competition.
“From the moment you walk in, they’re watching you,” said Zane Romano, an eighth-grader at Johns Hill who is in his third year of FIRST Lego League. “You have to be kind to your teammates. You have to be sure you’re working together. You have to make sure you’re really eye-to-eye, cooperating, being gracious.
“It’s so many things combined. It’s kind of overwhelming, but it’s also an amazing experience.”
The judges want to see if the students are being supportive of each other and their competitors, if they’re calm and friendly and helpful and not arguing. During project presentations, for example, the judges look for professional behavior.
“They don’t want you to talk with your hands,” Zane said. “That’s really hard for me.”
The two teams practiced together Thursday so they could run through their presentations and practice their other competition skills.
“They can give each other some constructive criticism and tips,” Bartimus said. “Our group has been to state before, and we might be able to help with what to expect there. We’re not experts, but we’ve been there before, and we kind of know what’s going on.”
The FIRST Lego League theme this year is “HYDRODYNAMICS,” learning how we find, transport, use or dispose of water. The Johns Hill group’s project is a filter with a test strip to help detect lead and the source of the contamination in drinking water.
Johns Hill was one of 12 Decatur schools to have levels of lead in drinking water samples higher than the 5 parts per billion state standard when test results were released in May, which is what inspired the project, Zane said.
Maggie McLaughlin is a member of the Dennis team and is in her first year of FIRST Lego League. Friends urged her to give it a try and told her she’d enjoy it, she said, and they were right.
“Seventh grade for me is all about kind of experimenting with who I am,” Maggie said. “I really like doing the project partly because that’s where I can really show my creativity, and it’s fun putting things together and finding out how things work.”
