Kendall’s FIRST® LEGO® League team, the Lost Lightning Eagles, competed in a qualifier tournament in November, winning Champions award. This award recognizes the team that most embodies the FIRST® LEGO® League experience by fully embracing their Core Values of discovery, innovation, impact, inclusion, teamwork and fun, while also achieving excellence in both the robot game and innovation project. By winning this highest honor, the Kendall team will go on to the regional Finger Lakes FLL Championship competition on December 8 at the University of Rochester.
FIRST® LEGO® League is an accessible, guided, global robotics competition, helping students and teachers to build a better future together. The program is built around theme-based Challenges to engage children ages nine to 16 in research, problem solving, coding, and engineering. The goal is for students to emerge more confident, excited, and equipped with the skills they need in a changing workforce.
For this year’s competition, students were tasked with finding a problem with a local building or public space. The team believed that Kendall did not have a town library at first, but after completing some research, they discovered there is a small one located in the Kendall Town Hall. They visited the library and met librarian Eileen Grah along with town officials Barb Flow and Tony Cammarata. They discussed with them the importance of a library and book access for children in Kendall, especially over school breaks. Through these discussions, the team discovered that one problem the library faces is lack of exposure; many students and their parents are unaware of the library’s existence as a resource in the community. There is no way to know what books are in the library since they do not have a public database.
Students decided that the best way to raise awareness of the library and increase patronage was to create a website for the library with a searchable database of books. Team members learned how to code a website in HTML, CSS and Javascript, and they created the website www.kendallreads.com. The team hopes this website will be a helpful tool in promoting literacy in Kendall.
Competition judges offered the following feedback about the Lost Lightning Eagles: “A community in need with kids wanting to read. They researched and shared a solution that showed they cared. With a sleek and robust robot they had a creative spring swing. The team created a lot of hype, by bringing teams together on Skype. Their solution was just right, the town can now use their website. The library is no longer lost and at a very low cost.”
The Lost Lightning Eagles team members are Madison Hults, Alek Odalovic, Dominic Dellaquila, Caleb Schumacher, Caleb Schneider, Robert Henry, Cody Johnstone, Alex King, Seth Pray, and Carter Alt; student coach David Elliott; and adult coaches Jackie Nielsen and Wendy O’Hearn.
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