Assembly Required — Local robotics team heading to FIRST LEGO League World Festival in Texas
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The robotics team, Assembly Required, recently competed in the state championships earlier this month and advanced to the FIRST LEGO League World Festival in Houston.
Assembly Required won the Innovative Project Award on April 2 in Niceville, Florida, during the state championship competition. The team will head to the World Festival from April 20-23 for overall performance.
"I’ve been involved in this for 10 years. It’s just really great to see the growth in students and see the cumulative games from each team over the years has really grown," Assembly Required coach Pearce Augustenborg said.
The team practices every Saturday.
"My role diminishes with each practice," he said. "I’m heavily involved with teaching lessons. We take a different approach. We teach about mechanics and code before building. Once they know they have to apply and do all the work."
Practices for the team start in August.
Augustenborg said the Edison and Ford Winter Estates has been involved in robotics since 2011, when it got the program going with mentors, coaches and judges. The current team, Assembly Required, began in 2018 with fourth and fifth graders of Edison Park Elementary School.
"We are a community team," Augusten-borg said, adding that the team has a couple of students from different schools. "We still have three of those original members from the 2018 team."
There are eight members ranging from fourth to eighth grade. A number of the students participate in the Edison and Ford Winter Estates summer camps, or are involved at the estates.
The students on the team include: Delaney Baucom: Paul Lawrence Dunbar Middle, 8th grade; Nash Baucom: Paul Lawrence Dunbar Middle, 6th grade; Sebastian Augustenborg: Paul Lawrence Dunbar Middle, 8th grade; Nishini Fernando: Paul Lawrence Dunbar Middle, 8th grade; Morlu Dennis: Paul Lawrence Dunbar Middle, 7th grade; Dhira Sharma: Allen Park Elementary, 5th grade; Eyan Datil: Oak Hammock Middle School, 6th grade; and Jake Kasai-Hazekamp, home schooler, 4th grade.
Before 2018, Augustenborg was judging and mentoring before he got back into coaching teams.
"The most intense and fun is to have your own team," he said. "The administration at the Estates is excited about doing a team and reaching out to different families."
There are more than 200 robotics teams in Florida, which are all part of an international program.
Before making it to the World Festival, the team went through a qualifying tournament where half of the teams were eliminated before moving onto the regional tournament.
"That leads to all the invitationals," Augustenborg said.
There are four categories in which the teams are judged: visual, core values, innovation project and technical.
"The robot game was certainly a big aspect," he said. "The robot we had is a revolution."
The robot is more complex with more advanced techniques, such as sensors.
"The fact that we got into those sensor uses, practices and techniques, as an educator, I’m really proud about," Augustenborg said.
The innovation project this year had a theme of Cargo Connect, transportation of goods around the world.
"It was really challenging for the kids to narrow it down. It was a great experience," he said. "It’s a really hard thing to do at any level of academics, to narrow it in a way that is something they can accomplish. It’s an important academic skill. They did a lot of general research."
The team decided to focus on reusable boxes. Augustenborg said they wanted to tackle the problem of too much cardboard in the world. The project consisted of a deposit system where individuals would pay a fee to have their package in a reusable box, which completely collapses in a simple motion.
Once the box is returned, the deposit is also returned.
"They didn’t invent brand new things. They took other ideas and combined it in a unique way. A lot of Edison’s inventions were innovations of ideas that didn’t quite work," he said.