The two bright yellow trophies made up of Legos stored inside the garage of Bellevue Robotics Team coach David Zook represent more than a couple of plastic toys. To the seven young men who make up the team, the trophies represent months of hard work laboring over the mechanics of a project built on the fundamentals of engineering, computer programming, problem-solving, researching and team work.
The team of eighth grade Odle Middle School students and a sixth grader from Tyee Middle School traveled to Dayton, Ohio to represent Bellevue at the FIRST Lego League United States Open Championship on May 8. The event brought together the top 60 teams, of over 9,000, from across the United States.
The Bellevue Robotics Team placed third in the competition.
This year’s theme was Climate Connections. Each team was required to research a solution to a climate problem and then implement it in project form. The teams were judged in four categories including robot performance, robot design, team work, and the overall project.
The Bellevue team decided to address the need for reducing global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2).
“For our project we investigated waste reduction to prevent sending trash to landfills to reduce CO2 emissions,” explained Tyler Okamoto, an eighth grader from Odle Middle School. “When food or any organic matter goes to landfills it omits CO2 and methane harmful greenhouse gas. Methane is 22 times more harmful than CO2,” he added.
Together, the team went to Odle Middle School and presented the concept of composting. They did a preliminary and post garbage audit over the time span of two months to see how much trash the school produces on average.
“We discovered food waste went down 95 percent after we started composting,” said Okamoto. “It was pretty cool.”
For the national competition, teams of 3 to 10 work to build and program a robot to complete 18 tasks on a competition table in a 2.5-minute robot round.
“For demonstrating the project, we use a large board to represent a model of our proposed solution to the CO2 problem,” explained team member Luke Pfleger. “There is a research center, levees, flood gates, and other tasks. Then we have to create a robot and program it to go around and complete the tasks in an alloted amount of time. We only had two and a half minutes so it’s stressful, but exciting.”
“A lot of work goes into this project so to have all the time and energy pay off is a good feeling,” said Zook, who has coached the Bellevue Robotics Team for five years. “This is a great group of kids who worked hard to achieve what they did. I’m proud.”
Lindsay Larin can be reached at 425.453.4602.
