Students from U.S., foreign countries meet in Fayetteville for science, technology contest

NWA Democrat-Gazette/ANDY SHUPE Students watch while wearing costumes Friday during the FIRST Lego League Razorback Invitational at the Arkansas Union on the University of Arkansas campus in Fayetteville. The event features teams from 31 states and 12 countries and is hosted by the Freshman Engineering Program. For photo galleries, go to nwadg.com/photos.
NWA Democrat-Gazette/ANDY SHUPE Students watch while wearing costumes Friday during the FIRST Lego League Razorback Invitational at the Arkansas Union on the University of Arkansas campus in Fayetteville. The event features teams from 31 states and 12 countries and is hosted by the Freshman Engineering Program. For photo galleries, go to nwadg.com/photos.

FAYETTEVILLE -- On one side of the Arkansas Union, student teams tested skills of robots they built out of blocks and a programmable controller. On the other side, they shared solutions for finding a better way to help someone learn.

The FIRST Lego League Razorback Invitational event, organized by the University of Arkansas Freshman Engineering Program, drew 1,200 students, team coaches and family members to the campus Friday. The event kicked off Thursday and concludes with an awards ceremony Sunday.

The camaraderie and creativity of the teams was evident with hats, including chefs hats, and catchy names, such as the Harry Bot-ters.

A nonprofit organization, FIRST, or For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, partnered with Lego Group in 1998 to create the FIRST Lego League, a program to excite children about science and technology projects. The league organizes an annual competition with three components for teams of students who are between 9 and 16 years old: a robot game and a project to develop solutions to a problem. Teams also are judged on how well they follow the core values of the competition.

Core values include working as a team, following guidance of coaches and mentors, learning together and valuing discovery more than winning.

The opportunity to make robots with Lego blocks hooks children into the competition, but the heart of the competition is centered around the research design project, said Richard Cassady, director of the UA Freshman Engineering Program.

Team members of Braille Boys & Annie from Cumming, Ga., were concerned about the literacy of blind children after learning from the National Federation of the Blind that 90 percent of blind children don't learn Braille, said Christian Carto, an 11-year-old fifth-grader.

Their first product to make teaching Braille easier was built with a children's book with a sound pad for every letter of the alphabet, but that idea couldn't be patented. Then they created the Insta-Braille 2.0, a 2-inch thick keyboard with a voice recording of each letter of the alphabet, numbers and contractions, and a headphone jack.

The device has a port for a memory card used to switch the device to another language, Christian said.

The team is raising money to donate an Insta-Braille to every school in the U.S. teaching blind children, Christian said. The team members have raised nearly $12,000 of $30,000 toward that goal.

"Our goal is to teach more kids Braille," Christian said. "They can practice it on their own."

The SAP Rainbows Bricks team from Letterfrack in County Galway, Ireland, wanted to help young children learn music, said Colin O'Malley, an 11-year-old fifth-grader. At his school of 82 children, children start learning the tin whistle and then graduate to other instruments, Colin said.

"We thought it was really hard for kids to learn music," Colin said.

Instead of remembering the letter names of notes, the team color coded a tin whistle and developed bracelets with colored plastic beads that correspond to the notes of songs, such as a violet bead representing a B note, Colin said. They used the whistles to teach 5- and 6-year-old children to play a song called O'Connor's Polka.

The idea is having an impact, their principal, Laura Dunne, said.

"It's giving an opportunity to learn at a much younger age," Dunne said. "They younger you start, the better."

Teams are organized into 100 regions with most regions having a qualifying tournament, Cassady said.

Regions are selected to send top teams from the qualifying tournaments to the annual World Festival tournament in St. Louis. Other top teams receive invitations to open invitational championships.

The Freshman Engineering Program has acted as a host for qualifying tournaments in Arkansas. This was the first year for the program to be involved in an open invitational championship.

"The kids at these events might become engineering students," Cassady said.

NW News on 05/16/2015

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