Robots teach real-life skills

RICHMOND, Va. -- The object of the game at the FIRST Robotics statewide competition in Richmond was to get as many soccer balls into the goal as possible.

The trick was to do it while controlling a wheeled robot about the size of a footlocker in an arena the size of a modest living room while another robot team tried to do the same thing, or even tried to prevent your team from making goals.

Manassas city's Osbourn High School sent its team, Lambda Corps, to the competition at Virginia Commonwealth University, where tactics in the arena were brutal.

But things outside the arena were a bit more convivial.

Teams gave up spare parts to others and offered technical assistance when and where they could.

Ultimately, cooperation and learning were the real goals of the competition.

The goal of FIRST, or “For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology,” is to inspire the next generation of scientists, engineers and innovators and prepare them for the technologically advanced workplace of the future.

The annual competition is supposed to teach team members to form relationships outside the arena and learn to work and play well with others.

Lambda Corps team members Angela Jividen and Jeff Hill said talking to other teams might be the most important lesson learned at the competition.

“One of the really important things is to form alliances,” Jividen said.

“There’s a likelihood that they’ll wind up being your teammate at some point,” Hill said of the competition where teams are eliminated only to rise to compete again as they form those alliances.

Matt Laszewski, a project manager at Lockheed Martin, which helped sponsor the Osbourn team, said he wishes he had been a part of a similar program when he was younger.

“I do this because I wish that when I was in high school somebody had done something like this,” said Laszewski, who mentors the Lambda Corps team members.

He said the hands-on experience of designing and building in six weeks a robot that can play soccer teaches science, math and engineering.

“In college you spend the first couple of years doing the really basic, complicated math in all sorts of unexciting courses,” the 30-year-old Laszewski said. “This gives the kids an idea of what real engineering is like.”

Leah Frederick said she thinks the program works.

“You experience technology in a totally different way when you realize how much work goes into just making the robot move,” the Osbourn High School student said. “It’s about learning how to work as a team and that will help you in the future.”

She said she would probably continue the learning she started in the program.

“Once you experience the technology, usually you get really interested and you want to pursue it in college,” Frederick said.

Manassas Bureau Chief Keith Walker can be reached at 703-369-6751.