St. Olaf team takes top scores at robotics competition

Friday, Feb. 20, 2015

BOUNTIFUL — Participating in their first Lego League competition, the team from Saint Olaf School won first place.

The Lego Corporation sponsors a wordwide competition for teams of various age groups to challenge students to think like scientists and engineers. 

In the three-part competition, teams build, test and program a robot designed to solve a set of problems in the Robot Game. They choose and present solutions to a worldwide problem, and must demonstrate that they operate with core values that include team work, cooperation and good sportsmanship.

The St. Olaf team was comprised of five fifth-graders and five sixth-graders, who met bi-weekly since August under the direction of Mrs. Jeriel Zedaker, aided by her husband, Chris, a former robotics champion. 

After much research and discussion, the team chose to address the question of how to help make learning to swim easier.

They first built an obstacle course using Legos for their robot to navigate. The course, which took two weeks to build, had 13 structures for the robot to complete its missions. After three different designs, the team created and built their robot, which they named Gilligan Sparkly Jr. Gilligan is a moveable robot with one large arm designed to perform various tasks.

This Lego League competition was held at the McGillis School in Salt Lake; 14 private and charter schools entered the contest. Each school team had two minutes for their robot to successfully complete the obstacle course. Teams were awarded points for successful tasks and points were deducted for errors. They each had three rounds to try to obtain their highest score.

In addition, each team was required to give a presentation on how they incorporated core values in their own project and every team member was required to participate in the presentation.

At the end of the competition, Saint Olaf was victorious in the Robotic Section, scoring 170 points. The second place school scored 136 points.

Team Saint Olaf was also honored for their presentation over the 13 other schools. The judges were amazed that this was the first competition for Saint Olaf. They commented that the students were incredibly good public speakers and their presentation was obviously a reflection of the education they receive at Saint Olaf. Even more impressive was the fact they received no coaching on their presentation from their teacher, and created it entirely on their own.