L.I. Science Center’s robotics students have strong showing at regional events

Robotics teams representing the Long Island Science Center in Riverhead had strong showings in recent competitions.

The L.I. Science Center has begun offering after-school robotics programs through FIRST (“For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology”), a tax-exempt nonprofit organization that provides robotics programs to pre-K to 12th grade students. The science center had a FIRST Tech challenge team last year and expanded the program this season with two FIRST Lego League Explore teams (grades 2-4) and one FIRST Lego Challenge team (grades 4-8, in addition to the FIRST Tech Challenge Team for grades 7-12.  The programs were provided at no cost to students.

The science center’s Cailin Kaller said the organization hopes to obtain grant and community support to underwrite the cost of the program going forward, so that it can continue to be offered tuition-free to interested students.

The science center’s Lego Explore teams received coding awards at the FIRST Lego Festival held March 2 at Mineola High School in Garden City Park. The coding award is “given to the teams that were best able to communicate what their code actually did and were able to demonstrate it for the judges during the team’s review session,” according to Anna Lando, a teacher at the science center who was the Explore teams’ coach. 

Chris Pinkenburg, a physicist at Brookhaven National Lab in Upton, explained how the FIRST Tech Challenge program works. When the school year begins, they give you the challenge and the rules spelling out how points are scored, he said. “And then you have to build and program a robot,” to do the tasks required to score points, Pinkenburg said.  “There’s only a certain selection of motors and you have to have one set of electronics,” he said. “Anything else you can do whatever you want, which is really nice.”

After the qualifiers, the team takes the robot apart and rebuilds it, adding new features. The four students on the high school team — one programer and three others who worked on the hardware — put a lot of effort into the project, Pinkenburg said. 

“Basically the whole robot, as you see it now, came together after Christmas, in the week between Christmas and New Year, and they’ve been working on it every day since then.”

The first qualifier rounds were held in January, and the science center team placed second. In the second round of qualifier competitions, the science center team made the cut for the championship. 

At the championship, held March 3 at Mineola High School, the team took second place in the control award category, where for the first 30 seconds of a match, the robot performs autonomously, followed by two minutes of remote-controlled movements and task completion, Pinkenburg said.

The science center team didn’t get into the world championship — this year. “But we did really well,” Pickenburg said.  

The team works with another team in a two-against-two competition, he said. “It’s not battle bots,” he said. “FIRST pushes working together and becoming friends.” It’s like family, Pinkenburg said, adding, “a community.” The competition was among 24 teams. The science center’s team members came from Rocky Point High School, Shoreham-Wading River High School, Riverhead Charter School and Patchogue-Medford High School, Pinkenburg said. 

“In the end, the idea is that you basically give students the confidence that they actually apply for engineering. And by showing them that they can actually build a robot program and do these kinds of things, it really boosts their self confidence tremendously,” he said. The point of the program is to “get the next generation of engineers and scientists into the pipeline.”