Kids learn coding – and troubleshooting

**The SCI Bots team with their award-winning robot. From left, Eithan Alcorn of Kiron; Elwood Burns of Odebolt; Tucker Greenwald of Ida Grove; and Francina Burns of Odebolt.**

SCI Bots, a team of students from Sac, Crawford, and Ida counties, won the best robot design award at the January 6 First Robotics competition at Kingsley High School.

The competition was the first for the SCI Bots team.

The “SCI” in the team’s name stands for Sac, Crawford, and Ida counties.

The students on the team are Elwood and Francina Burns, homeschooled students from Odebolt; Eithan Alcorn, a Schleswig Elementary School student from Kiron; and Tucker Greenwald, an Ida Grove Elementary School student from Ida Grove.

SCI Bots placed sixth out of 12 teams in the regional qualifier and narrowly missed a chance to go to the next level; the top five teams will go on to the Iowa FIRST LEGO League State Championship this weekend, January 27 and 28.

FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) is an international youth organization that operates the FIRST Robotics Competition, the FIRST LEGO League Challenge and several other competitions.

The SCI Bots team’s adult leaders are coaches Josh and Rachel Burns, of Odebolt, and mentor Beth Greenwald of Ida Grove.

Kiron Speech Path, the company Rachel Burns operates in Kiron, sponsored the team and purchased the necessary materials.

The team was formed in the fall of 2022.

“We found some kids in the area who were interested in trying it out, so we ran a season with all the materials last year,” Burns said. “We met for 12 Sundays – not necessarily consecutive –and ran though some lessons, some teambuilding activities, coding, building the robot.”

The team didn’t go to any competitions last year.

“This season started in August, and we started the season this time with the goal of attending one competition,” she said. “We started with a bigger group of kids from Sac, Ida and Crawford counties and we actually had a kid from Harrison County, as well.”

Not all of the kids were involved in the First Robotics event.

“Towards the end of the season, we identified the kids who had attended 80% of our sessions, as well as were able to code and understand the missions the robot had to complete,” Burns said. “Those are the four kids we ended up taking to competition.”

**After one of three robot matches, the SCI Bots team members wait for their score from the judge.**

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**Tucker Greenwald, of Ida Grove, shows off the team’s award.**

The SCI Bots robot design was singled out by the judges for its unique design.

“The kids came up with a system to have interchangeable arms, so the different arms could interact with different mission models for the best results,” Burns said.

Each team’s robot was judged on a rubric by a panel of three judges.

“The kids needed to explain to the judges how they built their robot, why they chose to build it in the way they did, and what different attachments they were using,” she said.

The students were required to build a functioning, drivable robot with a choice of sensors.

“We have a color sensor, a light sensor, and we have a distance sensor,” Burns said.

“They (the robots) go on a big mat that has different colors and different tracks where the color or light sensors can be used. The goal is to get the robot to complete different missions by interacting with these models. All teams address it differently. We built a table to put the mat on and then the kids try to get the robot to complete these missions to earn points.”

For kids in the SCI Bots team’s age range, which is 9 to 12 years, “block coding” is used to program the robot’s actions.

In block coding, text-based computer commands are grouped in pre-programmed blocks that the students drag and drop to build computer programs.

“They basically drag blocks that have different language on them that make the robot do different things,” Burns said. “It sounds really easy, but it ends up being quite challenging and requires a ton of troubleshooting.”

The team members have to explain to the judges how they went about coding, what went well and what didn’t go well.

“They needed to have participation from all team members, which was really cool because two of our team members are only nine years old and they were able to get up and speak in front of these judges, as well,” Burns said. “It was essentially judged on teamwork and inclusion, on the design of the robot, the approach to coding, whether the coding was successful, and whether they could convey all this information to the judges.”

She said she was interested to watch the interactions of the team members, who had different personality types and different abilities.

“From our larger group, we had some kids who maybe didn’t have the best fine motor skills, so actually building those models or assembling the robot was hard and they had to figure out a way to stick with it,” Burns said. “For all of the kids, the coding was a challenge, depending on the personalities of the kids. Really working as a true team, given their ages, was very challenging but we were able to show improvement in that. It was interesting for me to see this kid has improved over our sessions in his ability to socialize with other kids, or this kid went from not knowing how to code to understanding coding and being able to do it, or this kid, who didn’t want to be on a team, now knows how to work on a team. That part was surprising.”

The First Robotics challenge for next season will be revealed in August.

“We would welcome some new kids to the program,” she said.

Burns noted that sometimes kids find that robotics just isn’t their thing.

“What we’re finding is while a lot of kids like showing up and checking it out, it’s been a smaller percentage of those kids who can really get their brain around coding or are really interested in coding,” Burns said. “Being kids, they have to try out different interests and prioritize those. We’ve been meeting on Sunday afternoons, so for some kids that conflicted with football in the fall. Sometimes, they chose that event over ours but that’s OK because now they’ve had an introduction to coding and they can see if it’s something they want to continue with or not.”

For more information about SCI Bots, contact Burns at 712-371-3566.