Portland St. Patrick Catholic School

 One of the extra-curricular activities that we offer to our elementary/middle school students is the Rockbots team.  Rockbots is our school robotics team that allows students the opportunity to participate in the FIRST LEGO League (FLL) which is an international program for students age 9-14.  Students build and program their robots and also build the course to complete the missions that have been assigned by theFLL.  Teams consist of up to ten members(St. Patrick had two teams this year) and focus on team building, problem solving, creativity, and analytical thinking. The competition combines a hands-on, interactive robotics program and a research presentation in a sports-like atmosphere. 

The St. Patrick SchoolRockbots team participated in the FLL annual competition on the weekend of November 12.  This year’s theme was food safety, and our  teams focused their research efforts on salmonella and listeria.   According to Coach Chris Pung, “The teams focused on finding solutions to prevent the spread of these diseases.”  One simple but effective solution was to create a refrigerator magnet that shows the proper method of storing foods in the refrigerator to prevent the spread of listeria from meats to other foods.  A second idea which would need to be developed was to create human safe food dye that can be injected or sprayed on foods to indicate the presence of harmful bacteria.

The two Shamrock Rockbots teams traveled to East Lansing to compete against 22 other schools.  They were graded on their presentation, how well the robots fared in completing their missions, teamwork, and a technical grade for their robot and the team’s knowledge of the robot.  The missions are constructed from a set of Lego parts utilizing on-line technical manuals. Each mission is set up on a four foot by eight foot mat and will need to be completed by the team’s robot.

Even though the teams did not qualify to compete at the state level, they performed well placing 12th and 14th in the robot competition, scoring 99 and 97 points respectively.  Both teams were awarded second place trophies in overall project and quality of research. Coach Pung said, “The teams performed well and were very competitive, especially when considering that the majority of the teams in the competition had 7th and 8th grade students while our teams consisted of students from the 4th and 5th grade.”

I commend Chris and Janet Pung, Kathy Pung, and Don Gunderman for the outstanding job they did in running the Rockbots Program this school year.  The students were well prepared for the competition on Saturday and represented our school very well.  Members of team 1 are David Kreiner, Chloe Lay, Jake Pung, Joe Timmer and Grace Timmer. Members of Team 2 are Zak Arwood, Tyler Coyne, Jeff Davlin, Karley Goodman, Annie Gunderman, Jenna Pung, Bret Weller and David Yang.