Austintown students get creative at LEGO robotics tournament

AUSTINTOWN

It was like the Olympics for smart kids.

That’s what members of Austintown Middle School’s “Team Anti-Matter” said of the FIRST LEGO League District Tournament on today at AMS. Overall, more than 250,000 students from 80 countries participated all over the world.

FLL is a robotics program for students age 9 to 14, designed to generate interest in science and technology, as well as teach them employment and life skills. The intent is to create an interest in engineering careers in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) fields.

“So many kids these days look up to sports stars as heroes,” said Andy Yantes, event coordinator. “The idea here is to see if we can elevate engineers to that star level, like athletes.”

Fourteen middle-school teams took part in the local competition, with the top five teams advancing to the state tournament in Dayton. Yantes said teams came from as far away as Cleveland and Columbus to compete in Austintown.

Each team had to build a robot, using a LEGO Mindstorms kit, and put the robot through a designed course of action. They also were given a challenge to come up with a creative, innovative method of teaching others. They were judged on their robot’s performance, their teaching project and how well their efforts conformed to the core values of FLL.

Team Anti-Matter of AMS created a virtual-reality method of teaching history.

Also representing AMS was the team S.M.A.R.T. Cookie.

For its project, the group designed a cellphone app to help students with attention deficit disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder learn math.

Read more about the competition and how the local teams fared in Sunday's Vindicator or on Vindy.com.