LRE-I,Robot

Dear LREI Families:

For many years, robotics has played an important role in the Middle School science and technology curricula. As many of you already know, our classroom inquiry has been supplemented by our award winning Middle School Robotics team. This year, interest in the program has grown so much that we now have two teams competing in the FIRST Lego League. This past weekend, both teams competed in the Manhattan borough competition and they both did extremely well.

• The Advanced Team won 1st place in the Robot Performance category— their robot achieved the highest score in the competition in this category.

• The Rookie Team won the Champion’s Award — the Champion’s Award is given to the team that achieves the highest combined score from their Project Presentation, Technical Presentation, Robot Performance and Teamwork

Most impressive. Under the guidance of science teacher Sherezada Acosta, art teacher Carin Cohen, and computer teacher Steve Neiman, both teams will now prepare for the FIRST Lego League Citywide Competition in which the top teams from the five boroughs will compete against each other. This competition will take place on January 26th, so save the date! More details to come in January.

Whether as part of the curriculum or as part of our extracurricular program, robotics provides a meaningful entry point to learning that supports creative problem solving, experimentation and risk taking. Building a robot requires students to analyze their environment and the parameters of a particular challenge. Through this process, students quickly discover that even the simplest of tasks can be surrounded by a level of complexity that demands focused critical thinking.

As students work towards the solution to a particular problem, they also learn that having a good idea is not the same thing as designing and implementing a solution to a challenge. As a result, students learn to experiment with their ideas and adapt them to the constraints imposed by the real world.

They also learn to represent their ideas and plans in a formal programming language. This provides a direct experience in exploring how symbolic language can be used as a means for representing and describing actions that can be directly experienced and observed. Finally, because they engage in robotics with other learners, they regularly practice and come to see the value in collaboration. They learn that the successful completion of a task requires contributions from all of the group members and, more importantly, they see how their multiple points of view on a challenge can propel the group’s thinking in directions that they would likely not have discovered on their own.

So our robotics program is just one of the many tools that we use to narrow the distance between learning and experience that are part of our progressive toolkit.

With the robotic teams’ victories fresh on our minds, congratulations are also due to the Middle School Girls Basketball team and the Middle School Boys Basketball team who have both started off their seasons with impressive victories. Please check the home game schedule for the boys and for the girls and we hope to see you at the Thompson Street Athletic Center.

Best,
Mark