Holy Sepulcher participates in Lego league state championship
Holy Sepulcher Catholic School’s robotics team had a solid showing in the FIRST Lego League state championship, despite being entirely made up of first-year students.
The school’s Robotic Hornets advanced to the state championship at Palmyra Area High School, near Hershey, over the weekend of Feb. 15 after competing in regional competitions. Holy Sepulcher finished 17th out of 33 teams. Regional competitions included 330 teams.
Rick Rechenberg, an eighth-grade teacher at the school who is the robotics team’s faculty adviser, said the students have met for several hours a week since September to work on their projects.
The team is made up of sixth- and seventh-graders.
Team members received a specific package of Legos to be used in their competitions and used the bricks to build around a specific theme.
“In the fall, we receive a package of Legos, and it has a field map that you lay on top of a big board. It comes with Lego pieces you put together and it forms a big field. Every field has challenges and themes. The theme this year was ‘submerged’,” Rechenberg said. “Once you have all these, you have to take a Lego robot and program it to go around the board on its own and do all of its missions, and you have two and a half minutes. Every individual thing you do counts as points.”
The school said in a news release that for this year’s innovation project, Holy Sepulcher designed a “RoboMantaray” that would theoretically explore the oceans. They included “technologies such as echolocation, inferred 4K vision, and an electrolysis hydrogen fuel cell and 3D scanner.”
“Theoretically, their RoboMantaray can find unknown ocean life and take a high-resolution scan that could later be reproduced using a 3D printer. They shared their idea with the Pittsburgh Zoo and Aquarium,” the release said.
During team meetings, students learned how to use the Lego SPIKE Prime robot and engineered attachments to accomplish as many challenges as possible on the robotics table in two and a half minutes. Teamwork, good communication skills and problem-solving abilities were key parts of their success.
“It does sound like it’s pretty high level and complicated, but we’re using Lego engineering pieces, so that helps out a lot, and the programming is like a picture block programming system instead of writing out lines of code,” Rechenberg said.
He said the robotics team utilizes fun ways to introduce its students to learning important skills, such as communication, problem-solving and working as a team.
“A lot of these kids grew up building Lego sets, love to put them together according to directions, modifying them,” Rechenberg said. “When it comes to this, it’s just really cool, it’s something that’s hard to do, a challenge, but it’s possible. Sometimes, it’s learning how to do something. You learn how to do it and solve a problem. I think they really like that challenge.”
