Latimer Lane Students Work Together to Engineer a Better World

What if you could build a better world? Where would you begin? These are questions posed by the FIRST® LEGO® League, and this year a rookie team, the “UNcivil Engineers” from Latimer Lane Elementary School, is taking on this challenge of building a better world together—although sometimes that means starting with demolition!

FIRST® offers mentor-based programs designed to teach science, engineering, and technology skills; inspire innovation; and foster life skills such as self-confidence, communication, and leadership. Each year, the League releases a “Challenge” based on a real-world scientific topic. This year brings the City Shaper™ Challenge in three parts: the Robot Game, the Innovation Project, and the Core Values. Teams program an autonomous robot to score points on a themed playing field and develop a solution to a problem they have identified, all guided by the FIRST Core Values.

Already, the team has built their robot, dubbed “Nebula,” and they have created artwork that illustrates the League’s core values of Discovery, Innovation, Impact, Inclusion, Teamwork and Fun. These values are given a weight equal to the robot’s performance during the game. The team is fortunate to have a 3-D printer right in their library media center, so they have been hard at work making elements to populate their diorama, which will be a key feature of their presentation. For the Robot Game portion, the team has 2 ½ minutes to drive their robot to complete as many “missions” as possible. For the Innovation Project, the team must identify a problem with a building or public space in their community and design a solution. They must then share this solution with others, refine it and give a presentation at official events that includes the problem, solutions, and how they shared it.

To enrich the students’ understanding of engineering beyond the LEGO environment, Library Media Specialist Kristen Brighenti invited Jay Franza, a demolition superintendent from Manafort Brothers, to attend a recent club meeting and talk about a topic that the team could get excited about—demolishing buildings. In fact, the team’s motto is “Civil engineers build buildings…We demolish them!”

Headquartered in Plainville, Manafort Brothers is the oldest demolition company in the Northeast, and Franza showed lots of videos of buildings being demolished. He noted that his job often means going from one extreme to the next. Jobs range from nuclear power plant decommissioning in Illinois, Connecticut, and Maine to the tallest building at the time in Boston, MA, or the implosion of a hotel in Hartford to a family’s treehouse in their backyard. All of these jobs, he emphasized, require a lot of time spent planning before any demolition. The students had lots of questions about what they saw, especially with regard to recycling. Franza promised, “We demolish, then we sort and salvage as much as we possibly can.” He explained, “It’s very expensive to just get rid of the materials, and you don’t want the landfills all clogged up.”

The students were intrigued by how the company uses technology to sort and recycle the materials as well as ensure worker safety from dust and other jobsite hazards. Said Franza, “We used to sort by hand, and that’s dangerous. Now robotics helps us keep our workers safe.”

What does the future hold for industries like Manafort’s? Sixth grader Jeremy Varini described his personal vision, with infrared sensors that “control one excavator and one bulldozer that can tell which is which. It would sweep around and clean 100% of the rubble. People wouldn’t have anything to do with it, just stay out of the way!”

Students from ages 9-14 can participate in the club, and as such it isn’t always easy to blend such a diverse group of individuals. But this affable group finds much to agree on, number one being they are all interested in using engineering to solve the world’s challenges. The team is mentored by dynamic moms Christina Varini and Nadya Ismoedi, as well as Library Media Specialist Kristen Brighenti. Brighenti credits “her very dedicated library assistant” Jamie Baldwin, who volunteers to coach the team at lunch and recess time. All of these coaches know when to step back and let the kids take charge, too. Exclaimed coach Varini, “I’m not the coach, they are!”

The team will compete in their first regional tournament on November 23rd in Farmington, CT. State winners qualify for national championship in Houston, Texas, in April 2020.