A team of five robotics club students from years 7 and 8 of Cayman Prep High School won the West Coast Florida Regional First Lego League Tournament in Tampa, Florida on 5 February.
The victory was extra special for the school’s team, known as the Cyber Rays, as this is only the second year of Lego robotics education at Cayman Prep. In addition to placing at a level which allows the youngsters to advance to the State Championship, the team also earned the Programming Trophy for innovative use of the Lego NXT programming language.
The team from Cayman Prep were up against 32 teams in the one-day tournament. Only 10 earned invitations to advance to the Florida State Championship to be held on 26 February at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne. Fifty teams from the FLL Five regions in Florida will compete for the championship.
Just three weeks before winning the regional event, the team competed for the first time in a smaller, 16 team qualifier tournament in Clearwater, Florida. There the Cayman team advanced to the regional round and also won the Robot Performance Trophy on the strength of the performance of their robot, Robozilla.
The Cyber Rays are comprised of Hosh Martin, Ryan Kirkaldy, Nick Crawshaw, Mike Couvher, Drew Milgate and coaches Allison Smith, David Kirkaldy and Jeff Boucher.
Janet Crawshaw, parent of Cyber Ray team member Nick Crawshaw attended the competitions and said she was impressed with the teamwork, energy and enthusiasm exhibited.
“The level of competition is extremely high and our children have proven that an inexperienced team from a small islands can not only compete but excel. It was such a joy to watch them promote the Cayman Islands and see their pride as they parade and display the Cayman flag,” she said.
The first tournament saw the team paired with a team from Clearwater called the Mustache Motors, said coach David Kirkaldy.
“They cheered wildly as their friends the Mustache Motors also made it to the Tampa regional and again were so pleased to see that they got through to the State round. The kids exchanged T-shirts and have worn their respective shirts to their schools back home,” he said.
Mr. Kirkaldy said the Mustache Motors team is coming to visit the Cyber Rays before the state event.
Robotics is part of the curriculum at Cayman Prep High School using the LEGO NXT programmable brick system and accessory sensors. The school programme got a boost in June 2010 when it sponsored Ms Allison Smith, ICT teacher and Cyber Ray coach, in completing five days of training at the National Robotics Engineering Centre in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The NREC is part of the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute, a world renowned robotics organisation. Ms Smith, like all students at NREC, was surrounded by real-world research and commercialisation education and introduced to the Lego robots and NXT-G programme as a part of a Science, Technology, Engineering and Math curriculum.
Much of that training has now found its way into the prep school curriculum.
“We started informally in September 2010 as a club for the Years 7 through 9,” Ms Smith said. “In September, 2011, the school introduced robotics into the curriculum for all Year 7 students.”
Cayman Prep High School has 48 robotics kits.
School principal Sheila Purdom hopes to establish robotics programming techniques into the ICT curriculum for Years 7 and 8 and help provide a foundation for Year 9 students to move on to more advanced programming and to apply their knowledge of robotics in other areas of the curriculum.
“It is difficult to teach young students programming techniques as some of the concepts are abstract. The robotics programme that we offer uses the NXT-G language, which allows students to use advanced graphical-based programming tools. The students build their own robots then they write the programmes to make the robots work. In Robotics the programmes come alive and it makes a difficult task easier as students are motivated by seeing immediate results,” Ms Purdom said. “As the school looks forward to the future, we aim to stay on the cutting edge of educational technology.”
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