McBride Elementary School heads to regional competition

FORT BENNING, Ga., (Dec. 10, 2014) -- Innovation and teamwork helped McBride Elementary School's robotics team advance to the next level of the First Lego League Tournament.

Morris Code 6+1 earned third place at a tournament, held Nov. 8 at Columbus State University. The team will compete in the Super Regional Competition, scheduled for Jan.10 at CSU. Team members on the Morris Code 6+1 include fifth-graders Bella Padilla, Elizabeth Gil-Rodriguez, Jessica Shipp, Tate Sikes, Sean Kerr, Kylie Yaussi and KayLana Montoya.

Judges awarded points based on the robotics mission and technical design components, as well as core values and project components. They competed against eight other teams and earned additional awards for mechanical design and research.

During the project component, students were judged on research, innovative solution and presentation. Their project was designed based on the theme of finding ways to help others learn more efficiently. Their idea, So So Simple Single Sign On, was designed with focus on the completion of the new McBride Elementary School in 2016 and implementations of technology.

"We thought about going outside of the box and focus on teachers," team member Tate Sikes said. "Teachers don't know everything and they still have to learn things, so we thought that we would help them."

The team created a survey and discovered teachers were most frustrated about logging in and out of various Department of Defense Education Activity applications with unique passwords, causing them to lose instructional time and develop "password fatigue." With a single sign on server, user credentials are matched and compared to log into applications most used by teachers.

"We have so much technology in our new school and we want our teachers to use our technology to its fullest," said Margaret Koger, robotics coach. "They found that 25 percent of instructional time could be lost."

For the technical category, students shared robot mechanical design, demonstrated robot programming and discussed their innovation and strategy for the robotics. Using math and science principles to build their robot, named S5, the team wanted to make a simple, yet efficient design to reflect the need for quality learning in the 21st century.

"We were good at explaining our project along with our core values and teamwork, but the way the robot was built was complex, but simple enough to complete the mission," team member Jessica Shipp said. "Like the So So Simple Single Sign On, we designed our robot in the same way, which is to get the job done."

Team members said they were both nervous and excited about the upcoming competition, but determined to do their best.

One of the core values of Lego League is "what we learn is more important than what we win," Koger said. "However, we are very competitive. We have a great work ethic and we really enjoy being with each other."