Building anything out of Lego can be a creative — time-consuming and challenging — project.
For this group of young people at Hamilton Rehab Hospital, building robots from the famous interlocking, plastic blocks was also a labor of love that landed them several trophies, made of Lego of course.
The seven-member team at Ron Joyce Children's Healthcare calls itself the Hammerheads. They were among 400 students from grades 7 to 9 who participated in the first Lego League Provincial Championships Saturday and Sunday at Durham College in Oshawa.
Hammerheads is the only Children's Hospital participant to compete in the LEGO Robotics Competition in North America.
“They did a phenomenal job; everyone is proud of them right now,” said Mike Berube, a volunteer robotics coach at Ron Joyce.
“Because they're in a children's hospital, they learn persistence, they learn trial and error, they learn how to engineer their environment,” he said.
“They understand that if we try a little harder, if we try a little harder, we can be successful. And that really makes a difference for these kids in these tournaments.”
For team member Oliver Knight, trial and error is one of his favorite parts of being in the group.
“When I come (to practice), I have a sense of community and my friends are here. So it feels like we're messing around, we're messing around together, we're laughing and enjoying everything,” he told CBC radio. fresh air Show before their Sunday competition.
Working hard, 1 block at a time
Participating groups were tasked with creating a Lego robot that could “attempt to solve real-world problems,” according to the program's website.
Mattis Santos, one of Hammerheads' youth mentors, said that there is “a map and there are Lego structures, and your robot has to interact with them in certain ways to get points.”
“Maybe you flick a lever or maybe there's something in the structure that you have to (move), and that process is called a mission,” he said.
“The robots have 2 minutes and 30 seconds to complete as many missions as possible,” Santos said.
fresh air15:39We meet a remarkable robotics team
Today, students from across the province will compete in the first Lego League Provincial Championships. We speak to a team of children in grades 7 and 8 at Hamilton Rehabilitation Hospital to find out what makes this unique team so successful.
Berube said he, Hammerheads and another trainer worked about five hours every week for four to five months to complete the robot, so winning was “amazing for them.”
“The fact that they put so much time and effort into it and that they get this amazing reward at the end of the season proves everything to them.”
The competition has three main categories – robot performance, robot design, and innovation projects – as well as other smaller categories.
Hammerheads won second place for robot performance and another category – engineering excellence, which rewards their robot performance score.
But they came first in the loyalty challenge – where they teamed up with another team to try and get the most points – and Berube received the award for coach of the year.
He credited the honor to an “amazing team” that made his job “so much easier.”
Berube said a big part of the job is getting the kids to “calm down” and “enjoy the moment.”
Lego 'great' for fine motor skills
Berube, who has a daughter in Ron Joyce, has volunteered with the team for seven years.
“It was actually the kids who were insisting to us that they really wanted to do competitions, and that's how we got here,” he said of the event in Oshawa.
But the original idea came from Lindsay Bray, clinical leader for developmental pediatrics and rehabilitation programs at Hamilton Health Sciences who wanted to introduce the competition.
“We're always trying to work with kids and we're always asking kids to do difficult things,” she said.
“So we're always looking for things that will be motivating, and meaningful and fun, those kinds of activities.”
Bray said that Lego is “great for working on fine motor skills and hand strength,” so after learning about the competition, he thought it would be a “great idea.”
Berube said the next steps for the Hammerheads will be figuring out how to take robotics to the next level, the First Tech Challenge and getting kids interested in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).
“(We're) trying to facilitate how they continue to do these robotics groups in high school? That way they have potential careers in STEM,” he said.
