The team of seventh and eighth graders- called Brick and Sharky – learned about real-world problems and developed STEM skills.
A robotics team of seventh and eighth grade students in Moorestown competed in the FIRST LEGO League World Championship in Houston, Texas, during the week of April 16.
The event is a chance for students to learn about real-world problems and develop STEM skills.
Members of the team – dubbed Brick and Sharky – include William Allen Middle School students Nathan Solitro, Aiden Kovach, Malcolm Champion, Ella Yalon, Zoe Kane, Aaron Wilkie and Sean Wilkie. They are coached by Matthew Solitro, David Swingle and Craig Wilkie, and mentored by Moorestown High sophomore Thomas Solitro.
“They’ve really grown and they’re learning how to work as a team, develop ideas, share ideas and brainstorm ideas, and the challenges that go along with that are skills for adulthood,” Solitro explained. “This team, they all have different skill sets that work very nicely together for all the different varying aspects of this competition, but it’s important to us (coaches) that they all get an opportunity to at least do some of the coding and some of the building.
“It’s not really just about doing well in these competitions. We’re trying to (have them learn) technical skills, skills that they can use later in life.”
“It definitely forces them out of their comfort zone,” Wilkie noted of the contest. “Maybe some of them are more comfortable with the building aspect or the coding aspect or some might like to work on the presentation, but David (Swingle) and Matt (Solitro) have been pretty instrumental in making sure that everybody touches each piece of the challenge individually, and that way, they’re exposed to something that they may have not known that they were good at or were interested in.
“Each of them has individual strengths, and each of them gravitate to a certain thing and they learn from each other too.”
The FIRST LEGO League World Championship is an event where teams from around the globe compete at regional tournaments and local championships and the top ones advance to the world championship. Brick and Sharky competed in a regional competition this year at Rowan University, earning the championship award by winning the Robot Game, where robots earn the highest points by completing missions during the live competition.
The Moorestown team’s original robot died right before the contest, so they had to update the programming and function of their backup robot at the last minute.
At the qualifying competition in January, Brick and Sharky won the Core Values Award for displaying attributes of teamwork, professionalism and enthusiasm. Its innovation project focused on saving the environmentally vital kelp forests of the Pacific Ocean with two underwater robots – named Saylor Swift and Travis Kelp-sea – that teamed to prevent overpopulation of sea urchins.
The team this season used a new coding platform called Pybricks (Python and Block coding for smart LEGO hubs) to expand their programming knowledge and build on skills learned from prior robotic seasons.
Hosted by the nonprofit For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), the LEGO contest is an international event for youth robotics competition season. Each season features a theme that introduces teams to a real-world problem, encouraging them to explore and innovate.
Founded in 1989 by inventor Dean Kamen, FIRST is a global organization that prepares young people for the future with inclusive, team-based robotics programs for ages 4 through 18.
