A middle school robotics team based at the University of Nevada, Reno is helping students build literacy, coding and teamwork skills.
On a Saturday morning last December, the Wolf Pack Bots tuned up their robots and got ready for their first match of the day in the First LEGO League Northern Nevada qualifying competition at Mendive Middle School in Sparks.
The six Latinx fourth through eighth grade students go to different schools across the Truckee Meadows, but they’re all a part of Dr. Rachel Salas’ literacy tutoring program at the University of Nevada, Reno.
First LEGO League competitions require teams to build and program robots roughly the size of a shoe to perform specific tasks. The current theme of the competition is energy production, so teams are tasked with creating robots that could collect energy cells from a variety of miniature power sources, like wind turbines.
Salas, the director of UNR’s E.L. Cord Foundation Center for Learning and Literacy, says the robotics program is a way for students to build their literacy skills.
“Students are learning how to program and the programming is called word block, or Scratch, and there’s language involved in it,” she said. “They have to be able to read it and to be able to understand it to program the robot. The research component of the First LEGO League, absolutely, is beneficial to their reading skills, researching skills, writing skills and communication skills.”
The competition also includes a research project that requires the students to design a solution to a problem they see in the world related to the energy theme.
This year, the Wolf Pack Bots designed a solar-powered vest capable of heating or cooling its wearer and even created a prototype with thermal insulation and flexible solar panels on the back. The students came up with the idea after researching how farmworkers risk heatstroke in the fields and learning of the ongoing Russian attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure that are leaving civilians at risk of freezing to death.
The Wolf Pack Bots presented the vest to a pair of judges as a part of the competition. Rossie Copado Reyes, a seventh grader at Clayton Middle School in Reno, thinks the presentation, which featured a creative “Shark Tank”-style skit, went well.
“It went really well. I think so, ‘cause the judges, they gave us some really good feedback. They said it was good and to just present it to more people,” she shared.
Read the rest of this article, which was shared with Noticiero Móvil, over at KUNR Public Radio. This story was reported by Jose Davila and originally published on February 8.