04/05/2006
Robotics Club puts creations on parade
By: Jessica Selby

When you think Lego, you probably think of little towers and makeshift construction automobiles. Maybe the most creative child could mold an animal figurine out of a few small Lego pieces.

When the students in Rebecca Horton's Robotics Club at Flat River Middle School think Legos, they think well beyond that. Their first spark of creativity usually stems from the RCX Brick and light sensors, Horton said. From that point on, they go wild.

The students did just that for their participation in APC's Robotics Park at the Community College of Rhode Island this past weekend.

They created various light-sensored robots that took part in a robot parade. There were no remotes nor were there any strings attached. Everything that was needed to make the robots move and stay on the track was programmed into the RCX Brick and maneuvered by the light sensor that was attached to the front of each robot.

"There was a lot of math involved in the construction of these robots because they had to program everything into the RCX Brick in order to make the robot move," Horton said. "The light sensor reads numbers not colors so each color had to be programmed in as a number."

"They also had to know what gear to put the robots in because they had to stay in sync with the other robots in the parade," Horton said. "If they had programmed them to slow, they would have gotten rear-ended and, if they had gone too quickly, they would collide with the robot in front of them."

Rebecca Studley, Paige Cookson and Jessica Guglielmetti made a three-part robot which they called "Past and Present." Each component of the three-part robot was connected like a locomotive.

"City of the Dragon" was a robot created by Aaron Colaiacomo, Bobby Blackman and Shane Kirkland. The boys designed a float to represent a city with a dragon flying over it. There were people and buildings scattered about the scaled-down city.

A "Star Wars" float was created by Bryan Houle and Andrew Wolfe. The two students incorporated the use of electrical wires, geometric shapes and the theory of Yin and Yang in presenting their idea that the clone warship is flying over the Jedi in their float.

Emma Zecchin, Marti Rini, Taylor Burns and Michaela Clift created a float formally entitled "Six Feet Under" but known to them as "The Coffin."

"We all like the movie 'The Nightmare Before Christmas' and Halloween is our favorite holiday, so we connected our float to the movie and the day," said Burns. "We choose things to incorporate into the float from those things."

In addition to the creation of the robots, and entering the parade, the students also had to present their floats to a judge who asked them a series of impromptu questions regarding the creation of their robots, how they work and where the idea came from.

Each student group was given a written evaluation by the judge but they were not scored per se.

"Although the kids were not able to walk away with an official trophy, they should have gotten a lot of satisfaction from their participation in the event," Horton said. "I saw them really pull together as a team and learn to think quick on their feet so, in the end, I really think they got more out of it than they would have had it been a competition event."