Students take home awards at robotics competition

Academy of Saint Paul in Ramsey, Holy Trinity School in Westfield, The Academy of Our Lady of Peace in New Providence, and Saint Elizabeth School in Wyckoff competed in the FIRST LEGO League Challenge, a regional robotics competition for elementary and middle-school-aged children. 
Awards were given across four categories: Core Values, Innovation Project, Robot Game, and Robot Design. 

Academy of Saint Paul students took home awards for Robot Design and a Rising All-Star Award, although they did not earn enough points in the Robot Game category to advance to the next tournament. 

The 5th- and the 7th-grade team from Saint Elizabeth School earned enough points in the Robot Game category of the competition to advance to the Regional Championship Tournament at Mount Olive High School on Dec. 10.

The team from Academy of Our Lady of Peace, Panther Power Robotics, also qualified to move on to the Regional Championship Tournament at Mount Olive High School on Dec. 10. At the Regional Championship, they won the Innovation Project Award.

Holy Trinity School’s FIRST LEGO Challenge Team is comprised of students in 5th through 8th grade. The team created a Lego robot and coded it to complete missions around the energy-themed FLL robot gameboard at the tournaments last month.

A total of 74 teams from throughout Northern New Jersey competed in the Nov. 19 -20 robotics competition. Academy of Saint Paul’s teams competed in the Nov. 19 competition, dubbed the “Clifton Mechanical Mustang's FLL Competition.” Saint Elizabeth School competed in the “Bound Brook Bash” on Nov. 20.

The FIRST LEGO League Challenge is a national program that engages children in playful competition, character development, and meaningful learning while helping them discover the fun in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM.) Core values that govern are teamwork, inclusion, impact, discovery, fun, and innovation.

FIRST LEGO League Challenge Teams compete in regional tournaments, where judges provide feedback on their robots, coding, teamwork, and adherence to the FIRST LEGO League Challenge Core Values. At the beginning of the competition season in September, the teams are sent a packet detailing the challenges and tasks their robots must be programmed to do. At scrimmages, festivals, and qualifying tournaments that take place from September through January, teams compete to complete the assigned challenges to earn points to advance to the next competition. At each event, teams are given three attempts to accomplish as many challenges as possible in just two minutes.


Academy of Saint Paul students compete for points in the Robot Game at the Nov. 19th FIRST LEGO League Qualifying Tournament at Clifton High School.

“By embracing the core values, participants learn that friendly competition and mutual gain are not separate goals and that helping one another is the foundation of teamwork,” according to the FIRST LEGO League website.

“The thing that I love most about the FIRST LEGO League program is that the kids are awarded based on their involvement,” said Chris Grasso, a parent volunteer who runs the FIRST LEGO League Challenge Teams at Saint Elizabeth School. “As a mentor, it is important for me to teach the kids to take initiative, to fail, persist through that failure, and then try again.”

Brennan Burke, an alumna of Immaculate Heart Academy and parent volunteer who runs the FIRST LEGO League teams at Saint Paul School, said many of the values and lessons students learn by participating in the challenge align closely with the values of kindness, teamwork, honesty, and resilience that students are learning in Catholic schools located within the Archdiocese. “The core underlying principle of FIRST is their term “gracious professionalism,” which aligns nicely with our schools' teachings that we are all part of a greater community and that we should look out for ourselves and seek opportunities to serve others,” she said.

At the Academy of Saint Paul, teams are broken up by grade level: the 5th-grade team, Jr. Ironmen Epsilon; the 6th-grade team, Jr. Ironmen Delta; and the 7th-grade team, Jr. Ironmen Gamma. The teams at Saint Elizabeth School include students across four grade levels; the 5th- and 7th-grade team, The Robo-Crusaders; and the 6th- and 8th-grade team, The Robo-Crusaders Blue.

The FIRST LEGO League Challenge Team at Saint Elizabeth School has qualified for the State Championships three times in the past five years. Even when the in-person competitions were halted during the COVID-19 pandemic, the club continued to meet virtually and shifted its focus to completing a FIRST Innovation Project. The Innovation Project is a non-robotic competition category FIRST LEGO League offers to allow students to exhibit their problem-solving skills in real-world situations. To complete their Innovation Project, students must identify a problem within the Challenge Guidelines, design a solution, and then share their solution with others in a comprehensive presentation.

In 2020, the FIRST LEGO League Team at Saint Elizabeth School decided to address the problem of public health and fitness for their Innovation Project. They interviewed Rudolf E. Boonstra, Wyckoff's mayor, to discuss community public health needs. The students then designed a plan to install comfort stations around the city to address the health needs of homeless people in the community. They printed a 3D model of the comfort station using CAD Design Software.

That same year, the students also interviewed personal trainers, dieticians, and digital software engineers to develop a wireframe for an iPhone application that would address the fitness needs of people unable to go to the gym during quarantine. The app they developed combines social media and fitness tracking elements to encourage users to work out with their friends.

The students won an award for their Innovation Project in 2020 but have since refocused on the more technical, robotics-based competition categories.


Students from Academy of Our Lady of peace celebrate after winning the Innovation project Award at the 2022 FIRST LEGO League Regional Championship.

High school students in the Ironmen Robotics Club at Don Bosco Prep helped students in grades four through eight improve their coding techniques and prepare for the scored challenges at the Nov. 19 Qualifying Tournament. The Ironmen Robotics Club has also helped Immaculate Heart Academy and Felician High School in New Rochelle establish their own robotics clubs.

The Ironmen have various outreach initiatives in addition to helping FIRST LEGO League Challenge Teams polish their coding and competition skills, according to Father Louis Konopelski, SDB, an Engineering and Computer Science teacher at Prep and the Head Mentor of the Ironmen Robotics Club. This year, Ironmen Robotics Club students have been traveling to the Catholic Family and Community Services Office run by Catholic Charities in the Diocese of Paterson twice a week after school to help establish a FIRST LEGO League for underprivileged children and families there.

“FIRST LEGO League is great because, in addition to focusing on robotics, it is also focused on team-building and promoting strong values,” Father Konopelski said. “There is a great emphasis on gracious professionalism, making sure that even during competition, team members should be respectful to their competitors.”