Parkway team debuts this year

ROCKFORD - Ten Parkway Middle School students are learning this school year to problem-solve and cooperate while competing on the schools' new FIRST LEGO League team.

Beginning in the fifth grade, students are able to apply their knowledge of science, technology, engineering and math by playing with LEGO Mindstorm sets during their version of study hall called Panther Time, middle school principal Brian Woods said. These sets teach students how to build and program a robot to walk, talk, grab and perform almost any task.

Being on the team lets students use those skills competitively, Woods said. Those interested in being on the team applied and explained the reason why they would be a good fit. Some students said they are interested in engineering and coding, and others said the skills would help in a future career.

Guided by coaches Katie Kraner, Barbara Shellabarger and Barry Peel, the students researched a human water cycle problem and then were challenged to solve it.

Students butted heads at first, arguing their problem and solution were better than others. But over time, Kraner said they came together as a group and "learned a team effort is more valuable than an individual one."

Because they live in rural Ohio, Kraner said the students chose to come up with a solution to having too much iron in well water. While researching, they found the three most common types of iron in water and looked up solutions already being used to eliminate it.

Kraner said they used that information to come up with a magnetic mesh filtration system that could be inserted into the plumbing.

The coaches gave them an outline of the project to help them tackle one small task at a time as opposed to trying to create the whole system at once.
  Learning to program the robot caused headaches for some students, Kraner said.

"It was a lot of trial and error," she said. "If you're a little bit off, they learned how to tweak it. But if you have to tweak something, it's going to affect everything else after that, like a domino effect."

But this was a good learning experience for them that helped them learn to work together, Kraner noted.

"That's when team members stepped up," she said. "When one person got frustrated, they went and did something else and someone would give them some encouragement."

In November, the team competed in a district competition against 19 other schools' teams. They had to command their robot to perform a series of tasks. They also made a series of presentations to a panel of judges.

Overall, the team tied for third place in the robotics and programming competition but struggled during their presentation, Kraner said. As a result, the team didn't qualify for regional competition in Bowling Green in January.

Kraner said she feels the participants did well considering this was their inaugural season and looks forward to the program's future.

"If we have a big interest, maybe we will grow and have two teams. We'll see who's interested in coming," she said.