Forget word problems and quiz contests seventh-graders at Southwest Junior High are heading to state competition with robotic contraptions that would probably impress professional engineers.
But holding true to their 13-year-old minds, the students built their robots not with stainless steel but with the bricks of childhood Legos.
Testing their project, seventh-graders at Southwest Junior High, from left, Aaron Ideus, David Turvey, James Dean and Kyle Mendenhall try a Lego computerized toy. Their team constructed it Thursday for an extracurricular program called "Odyssey of the Mind." The team has won a regional competition and will head to a state match today in Manhattan.
"The biggest thing about this is coming up with something creative," said Daniel Zehr, SWJH team member. "But we picked Legos because they're easy to use and build with."
Zehr and six others will travel today to Kansas State University, where grade-schoolers, junior high students and high-schoolers from across the state will compete in the 2001 Odyssey of the Mind contest.
"This team didn't have any past experience with this," said Amy Weishaar, instructor of the school's gifted program. "I did Odyssey of the Mind when I was in school, so I knew what it was all about, but these kids did extremely well for it being so new."
The contest which reaches worldwide and culminates in a final competition later this year asks students to select and work on five long-term problems. Groups have several weeks to design solutions to the problems.
Zehr and his teammates James Dean, Aaron Ideus, Kyle Mendenhall, Andrew Killen, Trent Allen and David Turvey chose to work on a problem called "Techno-Pets," which requires students to build two "pet" vehicles that operate separately from each other and perform tasks for a score.
Using blue and black Legos and keeping with an Egyptian theme, the students constructed a King Cobra snake and a black cat, both battery operated.
And because one of the robots' tasks was to pick up an item and move it, the students created a small Lego scarab an Egyptian beetle for the black cat to carry.
"There are a bunch of different problems in one," Zehr said, adding that he helped program the robots to complete other tasks, including making one robot chase another, having one sound a warning and having each maneuver into an enclosure.
"Getting it to pick something up was really hard, but it was still a lot of fun. But the paperwork we had to do that sucked," Turvey said.
If the students win in Manhattan, they will proceed to the world competition in June, which will be in Maryland.
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