Jay school's LEGO team focuses on distracted driving

Jose Leiva/Sun Journal

Jay Middle School students, from left, Erik Taylor, Sydney Bishop, Emily Taylor, Brittany Carrier, Alyssa Timberlake and Alexa Perkins form the LEGO League team. They are testing the effects that cell phone texting has on driver reaction time using a timing system they created. Their adviser is teacher Rob Taylor.

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- Jose Leiva/Sun Journal

JAY — When Rob Taylor's FIRST LEGO League team met in September to decide on a topic for this year's transportation-themed competition they all agreed on one thing: They wanted to change the world with their project.

"They don't want to just do a simple project that explains that they learned something," said Taylor, who is the gifted and talented coordinator for the Jay School Department and adviser to the team. "They want to do something that makes a difference in their community and brings about changes."

LEGO League is an international competition developed by the For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology organization for elementary and middle school students. The purpose is to encourage students to become leaders in science and technology by engaging them in competitions designed to promote social, technology and life skills.

Each year the teams are presented with a different real-world theme related to the sciences, such as renewable energy or this year's "Smart Move," focused on transportation.

They are numerically judged on the construction and execution of a robot they build out of LEGOs to perform certain tasks, and a five-minute presentation on a topic related to the current theme. The average of the two scores determines if they move on to the next round.

The seven team members from Jay, who dubbed themselves "Six Chicks and a Dude," met after classes once school began and started brainstorming topics that not only fit the theme, but was also relevant to their age group and community.

"We automatically decided to do either drunk driving or distracted driving," says eighth-grader Emily Taylor. "Those caught our interest because in our high school there are a lot of people who are going to become teen drivers and we're going to become teen drivers pretty soon, too."

Motivated by the desire to make a difference, the team settled on distracted driving with the plan of creating and proposing a law to the legislator.

But just two days after they began researching the topic, the students found out that they had been beaten to the task when Maine enacted the distracted driving law on Sept. 12.

The law, outlined on the Lewiston Police Department's Facebook page, defines distracted driving as: Operation of a motor vehicle by a person who, while operating the vehicle, is engaged in an activity that is not necessary to the operation of the vehicle and that actually impairs, or would reasonably be expected to impair, the ability of the person to safely operate the vehicle.

One can't be pulled over simply for being distracted while driving, but if they cause a traffic infraction such as running a stop sign or going over the speed limit, and distracted driving seems to be the underlying reason, they will be issued the standard fine of $119.

So what do texting, applying makeup or reading a map all have in common? Well, if you're doing it while driving, the common denominator is danger.

"I found something on the Internet that says if you are driving at 60 mph and you're distracted for two seconds," says the lone dude on the team, Erik Taylor, "that you are driving unaware for half the length of a football field. So for 50 yards, you're not looking at the road."

Inspired by the startling facts they have discovered, the students have decided to embark on a public awareness campaign, including letters to local papers, a radio commercial, local television commercial and public service announcements that will be submitted to a national competition in New York. The students also plan to write letters to the Legislature and Gov. Baldacci asking for a tougher law in the state.

"When you don't know about how many people have died because of this, you don't think it's a big deal. But when you find the numbers, it changes your perspective," Emily Taylor said.

Over the past five years in Maine, according to crash reports filed by investigating officers to the Department of Transportation, driver inattention was the No. 1 contributing factor in highway crashes.

"There were 364,950 total crashes over the past five years in Maine, and 65,955 of these crashes were a result of driver inattention," said Mark Latti, public information officer for the Maine DOT. "That is 18.1 percent, or nearly one in every five crashes that is a result of driver inattention."

"We're trying to get information out there for people to realize that tons of people are dying every year due to distracted driving," said new member Kendra Peart. "We can make a difference, we know we can make a difference, and we want to use our talents to do that."

The students began their public awareness campaign Wednesday with fliers, a slide show and demonstration as keynote speakers at Jay High School.