BUILDING STEAM WHILE BUILDING LEGOS - INSPIRING CREATIVITY, CRITICAL THINKING, CONFIDENCE
Marcus Bugg (left) watches intently as he and his First Lego League teammates provide a demonstration of the Innovation Project to NAS school board members on February 14, 2023. Students learned design, coding, and engineering skills to program their robots to navigate around the course and skillfully pick up and move items and perform various tasks
Abinoojiiyag students bring home breakthrough Award in Lego competition
By VIVIAN LAMOORE, INAAJIMOWIN EDITOR
Nay Ah Shing fifth-grade students in the Science Technology Engineering Art and Math (STEAM) class at the Abininoojiiyag Elementary School participated in a First Lego League competition on January 14, 2023, in Otsego, Minn. This was the first competition this STEAM team had participated in and they came back winners bringing home the Breakthrough Award for their Innovation Project.
You may think of Legos — the small pieces of plastic bricks that can be stuck together to take different shapes and forms — as just a children’s toy set or game. While it is fun, and that is a big attraction for the fifth-graders, the Lego League offers an opportunity for students to develop skills in teamwork, math, science, and presentation. They also gain real-world problem-solving experiences through a guided, global robotics program, which in turn, is helping the students and teachers build a better future together.
The Lego league competition involves building a robot from the ground up, or one Lego piece at a time, as they learn coding and engineering skills. It is designed to inspire youth to experiment and grow their critical thinking, coding, and design skills through hands-on learning and robotics.
“It really is helping the kids learn how to be creative, develop confidence, and think outside the box,” Mary Pyawasit, NAS STEAM teacher/coach said.
The competition project involves different stages. The theme this year was on energy. The students first needed to come up with an idea to provide energy to the community incorporating core values. The students needed to research their ideas to be incorporated into reality, prepare and present to the judges a skit explaining their ideas and concepts, and finally perform the two-minute timed Lego course.
To research energy, Charlie Lippert from the Mille Lacs Band DNR office helped the students work through their concepts. The students wanted to be mindful to not take more natural resources than they needed. Lippert guided the students to develop an energy wheel that would conceptually provide enough energy for up to eight houses.
With their concept in mind, they got to work developing the plan to build the Lego robots that would navigate the missions of a robot game and skillfully move around a track, pick things up, and move them. Sometimes things go wrong, which may indicate a problem with the coding. But that doesn’t mean the project is a failure. Because the kids worked so well together and encouraged one another to use critical thinking skills, even when things did not work out as planned, they were able to quickly adapt, go back to the drawing board, so to speak, and solve the problem.
“When you see the kids have that ‘ah-ha’ moment, it is just so inspiring,” Pyawasit said. “And the kids all feed off each other’s positivity and confidence through that hands-on experience.”
The competition course includes coding skills to include various speeds, directions, degrees of turns, obstacles, and other maneuvers that test the skills of the students. “It is fast and intense, and the kids all did a fantastic job,” Pyawasit said. The students received this year’s Breakthrough Award.
On February 14, the students presented their full program to the NAS School Board members. Suzanne Terry, the secondary coach for the STEAM class, was unable to attend. Students participating in this year’s competition are Jeremy Drumbeater, Marcus Bugg, Phoenix Potter, and Cass Sam.
Inspirational posters adorn the walls of the STEAM room at the Abi school with messages such as, “It is not failure because I haven’t given up yet,” and “FAIL is First Attempt At Learning.” The messages remind the students that they "can do hard things."
NAS RECEIVES BREAKTHROUGH AWARD FOR INNOVATION PROJECT
The 2023 First Lego League students Cass Sam, Marcus Bugg, Phoenix Potter, and Jeremy Drumbeater along with NAS STEAM teachers/coaches Mary Pyawasit and Suzanne Terry bring home the Breakthrough Award for their Innovation Project.