Robotics competition instills love of math, science with challenges

HAMMOND | It may have looked like an arbitrary starting point, but for Richard Brown, placing his team's robot at precisely the right place could help get Columbia Elementary School's team into the state finals.

"It's all just memory," the fifth-grader said.

Some 20 robotics teams from the city's elementary and middle schools gathered at the Area Career Center on Saturday morning for the School City of Hammond's Lego Robotics Invitational. Ray Liskey, a fifth-grade teacher at Hess Elementary and head of the elementary robotics program, said the day was a practice run for next weekend, when teams will compete for spots at the state championship.

In its 11th year, the program helps provide a hands-on math and science lesson, said Jan Whelan, the district's gifted and talented program director. Through its broad student involvement, the program also bucks trends by having a high percent of girls and minority students involved, she said.

"One of the other outcomes is an increase in the number of students going into math and science careers," Whelan said.

Students work on the projects after school, using computer technology to program their robots to perform a number of functions.

"We put the steps in that we need and then we download them to the robot," Columbia Elementary fifth-grader Leonardo Ramos said.

A decade ago, Nathan Babbitt was building robots on Liskey's team. Now, as a teacher at Columbia Elementary, he's helping coach another generation of robotics enthusiasts. Projects take on a new theme each year, Babbitt said, and this year robots had to move things from one place to another and maneuver around objects.

His students also had to do a research project on issues affecting transportation. They focused on texting while driving and had a construction foreman talk to them about the dangers crews face on the road from distracted drivers.

Tweaking his team's project before team members faced the judges, William Ramos, a fifth-grader at Irving Elementary, said he has enjoyed building the robots each of the past three years.

"You can program them to do a lot of things," he said.