Through Their Robotics Club Students Let Their Imaginations Fly

Let your imagination run wild. As Walt Disney said, “If you can dream it, you can do it; remember that all this started with a mouse,” and that is precisely what a group of students are doing with their dreams at the Kendale Lakes Elementary School in South Miami.

The Robotics Club, taught twice a week after school to 12 students in grades 3, 4 and 5, has managed to advance so far that they will be participating in the State Robotics Championship VEX IQ to be held in February in Tampa, Florida.

How did the minds of those young students achieve that? Through effort and hard work, but above all by letting their imaginations fly— those were the tools they used.

The club, which teaches them about robotics, engineering, computer programming and critical leadership skills, was divided into two teams of six children each. There were two coaches and each team participated separately in the 2016 county competitions.

The competitions consisted of three components: First, design a robot with the ability to pick up and move things around. Second, write a computer language to program the robot to be able to make a series of movements without a remote control.

And last, develop a technological project which until now no one had invented. The project of the first team consisted of a small duck with an alarm and a camera for a swimming pool, with an application that warns if something has fallen into the pool, thus preventing a child from drowning.

The initiative of the second team was to design a rug that is placed next to the bed and when the person gets up, it activates an alarm letting the caregiver know that the individual is in movement. This is intended to help caregivers of the elderly or the sick.

Both teams not only managed to enter the state competition, but received two awards: one for design and the other for excellence.

For the teachers of the school, their students are already winners because they have achieved amazing results in such a short time and in such a complex area as robotics, where students must put into practice different types of knowledge.

“Our small school has risen so high, even though it is only our second year with the program. That is why our achievement is impressive and has brought tremendous excitement to our school family,” commented Dayami Borges, the school’s Media Specialist and one of the club’s coaches.