Congratulations to our leader, Edward Li! He won the 2016 President’s Volunteer Service Award bronze medal!
During 2016, Edward volunteered tremendous hours in teaching kids Lego Robotics. He taught in the Bergen County Academics After Hours Program and the JEI Learning Center. He even traveled to Qingdao, China during the summer, and taught internationally. About 50 kids learned Lego Robotics from him in 2016. All of them opened their eyes in the field of STEM because of him.
In addition, he showed his love to kids with special needs. In China, he visited the Autism Center in Linyi, paired students with autistic kids, and taught them how to build a Lego vehicle. When those special kids saw their moving vehicles, they could not stop laughing!
Edward’s volunteer journey actually started years earlier. Since 2010 when he was nine years old, Edward joined a FIRST Lego League team. During the first two years of FLL, he learned fundamental Lego Robotics knowledge and advanced knowledge. His FLL team started winning in regional qualifier and state. In 2012, he was invited to become a teaching assistant in Lego Robotics summer camp by Brainyak Kid. Since then, he never stopped teaching. He taught in a Paramus summer camp, he taught in the Glen Rock library, he taught in the Ridgewood library, he taught in JEI’s summer camp, and more.
Currently, Edward started to put his hand into maker area. He went to Shenzhen, China and brought tons of electronic components. He has even bigger plans to help kids in STEM field.
Let’s cheer with Edward. Way to go!
Several sixth and seventh grade kids came from different towns are enjoying these classes. Most of them never heard about Arduino and did not build any circuits before. They followed the club leaders’ instructions step by step. When the LED was bright up, big smile showed up on everyone’s face.
Kids not only learned the basic electronic knowledge from this class, but also gained the basic programming skills. The club leaders used several fun projects to build up their programming understanding. Kids created dancing lights, and police lights by themselves. All of them now believe they can make some creations even when they are young!
These maker clubs are important to students because they give kids an opportunity to use their hands-on skills. They also allow kids to practice teamwork, patience, persistence, and other skills neccessary for a successful career.
For FLL’s robot game, they built a very complex robot called the “3levator”, with its 3 elevator gear systems. The robot has two attachments, each of which can perform multiple missions inside one trip. It also uses three color sensors and one gyro sensor, making the robot’s movement more accurate. In total, the 3levator can earn up to 350 points.
In the Animal Allies project, they invented an innovative robot pet sitter called Pet Ball. The Pet Ball has three features: video chat, games for pets, and pet training. It takes care of your pet, entertains your pet, and exercises your pet, even when you aren’t at home. Additionally, the Pet Ball system is open to all developers, so they can create their own pet games and training activities for all pets to enjoy! As well as creating a solution, the team did tremendous research work on the issue of separation anxiety. They interviewed a vet and an animal shelter, and surveyed pet owners. Eventually, after researching and building a solution, they shared their project to Bloomberg, Montvale Animal Hospital, and even tested their creation with a real pet!
talked about how we learned about FIRST in the first place, explained the FIRST family of robotics competitions, and shared how we teach LEGO robotics. More importantly, we talked about the life-changing aspect of FIRST robotics,
skills. We had a class of only 8 people, so we were able to reinforce important building techniques like usage of black pegs as well as the simplicity of a build. One of the best aspects of this season’s class was the willingness of each student to attempt things that they were not exposed to previously. We enjoyed seeing our students think of innovative ways to retrieve loops or attack other robots in the SumoBot competition that we held at the end of our class. One of our students decided to attempt to spin quickly to attack other robots as well as prevent them from pushing themselves.
