Building Connections through Robotics
On Nov. 13, the robotics team Phantom Cubz competed in the challenge division of the First Lego League (FLL) competition at Valley Christian Middle School in Cerritos, California. This year, the theme of FLL’s challenge was Cargo Connect, in which teams built robots that focus on sustainable ways to innovate the future of transportation. Phantom Cubz, an all-girls robotics team that consists of 10 fourth and fifth grade students from Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District elementary schools, was mentored by students in Peninsula’s robotics club, Phantom Catz, for the competition. In FLL competitions, students use their science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) skills and problem solving abilities to create solutions for real-world problems.
The decision to create Phantom Cubz was made by the leadership team and outreach, one of the eight Phantom Catz subteams that works together for competitions. The outreach subteam assists in serving the community, which includes initiating STEM camps. The shared goal of leadership and outreach was for female members of Phantom Catz to have an opportunity to educate younger students and provide them with STEM experience for the future, so they registered Phantom Cubz with For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), the youth organization that operates FLL.
One of Phantom Catz’s main tasks was to help Phantom Cubz form an idea to compete with, which resulted in researching a solution to package theft; their reasoning for selecting this topic was because around 1.7 million packages are stolen or lost every day (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute). Thus, Phantom Cubz and Phantom Catz came up with an idea to scan package barcodes through Ring doorbells. In that case, if the package gets stolen and carried over a certain diameter, an alarm will sound while the owner of the package and police are alerted through the Ring app. At the competition, they first presented their innovation project, which was this solution to package theft. They also worked on a robot design, which was another category of the competition. During the weekly Saturday meetings that Phantom Cubz held at Peninsula beginning in early October, they designed and built a robot from parts given by FLL. Then, they presented this design and the process of how they built the robot for points. As the competition is intended for elementary students, more emphasis was placed on how the students have built character from building their creations rather than the ranking of the competition itself. In this year’s competition, Phantom Cubz was awarded the Core Value Award due to the teamwork and compassion the team showed during the season. Dapplegray Elementary School fifth grader Lauren Chin, a member of Phantom Cubz, is grateful for this experience and plans to continue robotics and programming in the future.
“I wanted to learn [how to build] a robot, and [I thought] doing competitions [and programming] was fun,” Chin said. “I think putting together the missions and the robots [is the best part]. It makes me feel excited to do the competition and it means a lot to me because it [will] show how much I learned in the program. I [have learned] more about programming and [will] probably [continue it] in the future.”
Junior Cedar-Rose Leach is the lead technical mentor of Phantom Cubz and teaches the students how to turn their ideas for the robot into reality by helping them learn about robotics. This process consists of assisting them in the basics of making and testing robots and how to overcome setbacks that may arise, like issues with time restrictions and programming. Leach enjoyed the process of teaching the girls and watching them grow.
“In the beginning, they were all shy and not very confident,” Leach said. “[However,] the more meetings we had, the more [self-assured] and friendly they got with each other. [They soon became] a lot more willing to take their idea and put it onto the robot rather than waiting for other people’s approval. This was really good to see because they had a lot of drive to start building the robot the way they wanted to build it.”
While Leach helped the girls with the robot and programming, junior Charlotte Chung, the lead research mentor of Phantom Cubz, helped the girls come up with their research project and guided them through this process along the way. As part of outreach, Chung has previously assisted in launching STEM camps, charity drives and parades. Creating Phantom Cubz was part of the effort by Phantom Catz to allow young girls to have a place in an environment that is currently male-dominated, with only 28% of the STEM workforce consisting of women (American Association of University Women). Although the FLL competition was Phantom Cubz’s first and last competition of the season, the team members and leaders of Phantom Cubz have plans to continue robotics activities in the future. Chung hopes that the girls will be inspired through this experience to pursue STEM despite any societal restrictions they may face along the way.
“[As mentors, we] want to make sure a team of girls will be encouraged [to pursue] STEM [and] feel safe to speak up and have their own minds,” Chung said. “So, [by] having a team surrounded [and mentored] by women, [we] make sure that [Phantom Cubz members are] in a [space] where they are completely encouraged and never brought down by their gender. I hope they have made friends and feel encouraged to pursue STEM without any limits or barriers.”
