Falk's Robotics Team wins 1st place in Programming.  (December 4, 2004)

" The Red Machine" (10 students in grades 5-8) participated for the second year in the sixth annual first Lego League robotics competition." The event filled Carnegie Mellon's National Robotics Engineering Consortium in Lawrenceville  where 73 teams used robotically programmed sets of Lego toys to perform various tasks. This year's contest theme was "No Limits," and contestants were instructed to come up with robots that could solve problems for disabled people. Falk's team constructed a  model from Legos called " Smart Steps" to be used in their verbal presentation. After researching disabilities in general, the team chose to use blindness as their focus. Falk school's steps and stairways would provide a challenge for any student with that disability. The model's steps used a series of beeps to let a visually disabled person know what step they were on and possibly which stairway. Bonnie, an employee of the Pgh. Vision Center visited Falk school to talk with the students about their invention and questions about this disability. For the main competition, Falk's robotics team constructed their own unique lego robot "to travel on a track where they had to open Lego doors, pick up eyeglasses made of Lego, feed Lego pets, put a Lego ball in a Lego hoop... Along with putting Lego robots through the standardized course to pick up points for every task successfully completed, the teams had presentations to make...Kids worked on these projects after school hours, on their own time." 

Mrs. Bianco, the robotics team's teacher advisor, watched the students progress in their efforts since the beginning of September. " Robotics has brought a team of students together from different grade levels and with different abilities to unite in a heroic effort. I watched and listened to the students explaining how their robot worked to a group of five judges. Afterwards, the judge said, " I'm very impressed with the fact that each student on this team understood how the robot worked to the point that they could finish each other's sentences."

Special thanks to Mr. Darryl Davis and his wife Noopur (father of Sean) who gave his home for training and practice many evenings and weekends.  He spent many many hours to teach them the basics and to work with them, so that they could come up with working designs and programs for robots on their own.  During the final two weeks leading to the competition, he met with the kids nearly everyday to help them perfect robot missions and also practice.  Also, thanks to the Falk parents who supported their children at the robotics event from 7:30 am to 4:00 pm. Participating students included: Hanna K., Helen K., Olivia M., Alex Z., Gautam N., Jasmine C., John Z., Taylor L., Sean D., Team shirts were donated by parent Mr. Silver and his company Branded Solutions.

( This article contains quotes from The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Dec.5, 2004).

Miscellaneous Materials (click on any image for a larger view, then click your browser's back button to return to this page)...