Tech Wizards join the Lego Robotics Program

Date: January 2006

Imagine building a Lego robot of your own design and getting to watch it zoom all over a competition table performing specific tasks before 300 screaming participants! Three 4-H Tech Wizard teams competed for the first time in this year’s Lego Robotics tournament.

The Oregon Robotics Tournament and Outreach Program (ORTOP) is a statewide program designed to teach students of ages 9 through 14 to use math, science and engineering to solve real-world problems. The group holds regional tournaments around the state in December and teams that qualify compete at the Intel Oregon State Robotics Tournament held in January at a Portland-Metro area location. The program attracts over 3000 Oregon youth to its program, and September through November finds girls and boys from all around Oregon learning how to apply math, science and technology applications to the challenge of building a robot designed to solve a multi-step challenge.

ORTOP team members don't need to be geniuses or techno whizzes. They just need to be willing to get together a couple times a week with their teammates and a coach and work together to build a robot they can take to a local tournament and hopefully onto state.

The first ever attempt at this program netted trophies for two of our teams. More importantly – three teams of elementary and middle school aged Latino youth experienced the tournament and acquired critical skills in making presentations, doing research, and programming and building robots to perform defined tasks under specific circumstances (undersea odyssey). Here is what Leovani had to say about the experience: “We are a team. Alex did the programming, Jose did the Poster and I built the robot. But we all worked on everything together!”

Four families also attended to try to better understand the value of the experience to their children and are very interested in having that experience continue!

Although we did not compete at the state level, our students attended the event to observe and learn.

Washington County 4-H Board of Director’s President Janet Rash attended the state competition and had this to say: “It is always a delight to see youngsters willing to learn something new, put their energy behind the task, and be thrilled and excited with the results.”

Press Contact:

Lisa Conroy, 4-H Faculty
Email: Lisa.Conroy@OregonState.edu
Phone: 503-725-2113

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