During two weekends in September, Titanium Robotics brought several of its members to K. L. Carver Elementary School to serve as mentors for their team that competes in the FIRST Lego League, an international competition organized for elementary and middle schoolers. The competition’s goal is for students to think like scientists and engineers by building, testing, and programming Lego Mindstorm Robots to complete a series of missions to earn points. Team members were invited to help the kids create an overall strategy for the game and a program for the robot; most importantly however, the aim is to encourage individual student leadership with Titanium Robotics members acting as support for more technical and difficult problems.
During Week 1, the main goal was to create an outline of the goals the team needed to achieve over a 6-week period to compete successfully. At Carver, the students were extremely enthusiastic about the event—especially when it came to building and testing their lego designs—but need experience to align their goals. To do this, Engineering President Olivia Cameron and Electrical Captain Brian Chu made sure that every student understood each mission objective before deciding which ones to aim for in order to optimize point gain. Meanwhile, Business President Kimia Hassibi, Business Correspondent Edmond Wen, and Events Coordinator Justin Jang tried to understand the fundamental elements of the software through trial and error to understand the tools at the students’ disposal.
The meeting concluded with clear objectives in mind for future weekends.
By Week 2, with a plan in hand, the students began working on solving individual tasks using a trial-and-error process. They first learned how to measure wheel rotations, distance traveled, and the relationship between the two before transferring that knowledge into code. They measured the distance on the field, found the wheel’s circumference using
the diameter, and divided the field length by circumference to determine the number of rotations necessary to traverse the entire field. The students also experimented with using different types of sensors (such as touch and color) to accomplish their chosen tasks.
Overall, mentoring is an incredibly rewarding experience for anyone in any field of expertise. First Lego League represents a new generation of STEAM enthusiasts, and it is the responsibility of their older peers to cultivate that enthusiasm. Titanium Robotics is looking forward to having new and exciting adventures with Carver’s FLL endeavors!
Titanium Robotics is a team consisting of over 100 students, mainly from San Marino High School, who come together with a common interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Students learn from professional engineers and mentors to build and compete in the annual FIRST Robotics Challenge with a robot of their own design. Programming, electrical work, computer-aided design, and business management are all run by student representatives, making the entire organization student-led from start to finish.
