Alone, it is nothing but a little block.
But with hundreds of others, it can be just about anything you want it to be — including an Arctic landscape.
That is what a few of the 30 Boght Hills students who took part in the Junior For Inspiration of Recognition of Science and Technology, or FIRST, LEGO League built this fall when they completed the annual FIRST challenge.
According to Michelle Simkulet, coach and coordinator of the Boght Hills Junior FIRST LEGO League and an 18-year engineer at InterScience Troy, the national FIRST organization presents all junior leagues and standard leagues with a science and technology-related challenge. Participants in the league then are provided a set of LEGOs and told to build something that exemplifies the challenge.
This year’s challenge, Simkulet said, was to study differences of climate throughout the world, and to construct something using one moveable part that depicts a climate.
The kids were learning about global climate, what climate is and tools that are used to study climate, said Simkulet. `In general, it makes the kids more informed about how climate impacts our daily lives.`
Simkulet said the league learned about climates of different natures, including arctic climates, warm-weather climates and even some climates a little closer to home.
`They learned about farm production and how it affects our daily lives,` she said.
Simkulet said the Boght Hills junior league does not focus as much on competition as it does on the learning aspect of the challenges, which is why each team of five and six students receives an award at the end of the challenge based on an element of their design that is unique in the league.
The students in the Boght Hills Junior FIRST LEGO League range from first- to fourth-graders, and they participate in the league once a week after school in the fall. While there are national challenges based on the FIRST LEGO League themes, Simkulet said the Boght Hills league likes to stay very local, giving each student a chance to win an award based on his or her construction and designs.
While students can learn about climate differences behind a desk in a classroom, Simkulet said the LEGO construction adds another element to the learning process.
`From the LEGO aspect of it, it is looking at the tools that scientists who study climate would use, and the challenge was to pick an area of the world that you wanted to look at and design a tool using LEGOs that would be used to study climate there,` she said.
Nine-year-old Matthew Simkulet, Michelle’s son and member of the junior league, said that his team chose to create a tool that would be used in arctic areas with glaciers.
`[We built] a weather boat, thermometers, a weather station, computers and a satellite,` he said.
Michelle said that other teams built tools based on climates of the moon, and many constructed tools that involved drills.
Other teams opted to construct the complete scene in which the climate research would take place.
All of the constructions were judged on Nov. 25, when the league met for the final time this season to showcase members’ constructions and receive awards for their imaginative work.
Simkulet said she has no idea what next year’s challenge theme will be, but Matthew did say that he hopes, in the future, a challenge will allow the league members to sculpt famous people’s faces.
If Matthew’s dream challenge ever does come along, he said he would like to construct President-elect Barack Obama’s face.
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