On average, every person on earth owns 86 Lego bricks according the Lego Company. And that number could grow with Christmas around the corner and kids looking forward to toy stuffed stockings. But the plastic bricks and Lego robotic systems are more than just toys. Play and science collided in the educational world of Lego tournaments last weekend at Paducah’s West Kentucky Community and Technical College.
78 kids with coaches and parents gather in a 10,000 square foot room filled with large and intimidating machines for the region’s second annual Lego League Tournament, bringing with them presentations, homemade board games and grey, wheeled robots about the size of a remote control car. All of these represent hours of work, collaboration, and hope for a chance at the state tournament.
An educational program linked to Lego hosts the event designed to engage kids in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. But this doesn’t sound like your average science bowl, math-a-thon, or academic team meet. A DJ is blasting music while kids dance and cheer as their teams command robots to navigate an obstacle course on a table. WKCTC’s Challenger Learning Center Director Mellisa Duncan helped organized the competition.
“It’s supposed to be a party atmosphere. If you were at a football game you would have music, you would have dancing, you would have a cheerleader, things like that,” Duncan said. “So that’s Super Bowl of the Mind, we strive to make it fun and exciting for the kids.”
7th graders Isaac and Rylee are teammates on St. Mary’s Circuit Breakers. They said their favorite part of being on the Lego team is working as a together and building the $600 robot. But the competition has another component. This year kids were set the mission to find an innovative way to help someone learn, so the Circuit Breakers designed a board game that teaches players about plants.
“Our idea was gamification,” Isaac said.
“I think using games to learn would be a good idea because people don’t like using paper and pencil all the time now, they want to use technology to like exercise their brain, I guess you would say,” Rylee added.
Their coach, Jeff Seay, is an engineering professor at the University of Kentucky’s College of Engineering extended campus in Paducah. He also played with Lego bricks as a kid and said the new technology his team has to master could be equated to science-fiction when he was a child. With a higher level of complication, Seay says his team has grown most in their ability to work together.
“One person just can’t do it all. And so they really have to rely on each other,” Seay said. “That’s an important skill but it’s one they’re not really used to. And so seeing them struggle through the process of how to work together as a team and how to work together has been interesting.”
As much as the program focuses on STEM, it places just as much emphasis on having a fun, friendly competition. The Lego tournament uses a trademarked term, “coopertition,” to describe the competitive yet collaborative atmosphere, as Duncan explains.
“You want to be highly competitive and you want to be proud of your team but you also want to be kind and cooperative with the other teams,” Duncan said.
And the “coopertition” between teams couldn’t be any more evident. As they tackle tasks with their robots in a space called “The Pit,” despite the ominous sounding name, opposing teams observe and give each other suggestions for how to improve their robot design and strategy. Mellisa Duncan remembers a team that epitomized the term.
“Last year a team I believe dropped their robot and a part broke or something fell and they couldn’t find it,” Duncan said. “And another team stepped up and gave them that part so they could compete immediately and not forfeit their time spot.”
According to a Lego study, these tournament participants will be more likely to attend college, twice as likely to major in science or engineering, and three times as likely to major in specifically engineering.
Of the 10 teams at this year’s event, SPARC Robotics of the Murray-Calloway County Homeschoolers were named the champions, while the Girl Scout team Girls LOL placed second. Both will advance to the state competition at Northern Kentucky University in February.
