WILTON — From 4-6 p.m. Wednesday, Aug, 14, Blue Crew FRC [FIRST Robotics Competition] Team 6153 partnered with Western Maine Play Museum to bring an evening of robots and STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] to area youth.
Members of Blue Crew FRC Team 6153 demonstrate and work with kids to program LEGO SPIKE robots Wednesday, Aug. 14, at Western Maine Play Museum in Wilton. Team members and advisors wearing dark blue shirts seen in no order are Jeff Bailey, Audrey Civiello, Lucy Knowles, and Landon Morse. Submitted photo
Blue Crew is a robotics team made up of students and adult mentors from Mt. Blue High School in Farmington and Spruce Mountain High School in Jay. The team competes in FRC, an international program that challenges high school students to design, program, and build robots to play a field game, according to the FIRST website.
Under strict rules and limited time and resources, teams of high school students are challenged to build industrial-size robots to play a difficult field game in alliance with other teams, while also fundraising to meet their goals, designing a team “brand,” and advancing respect and appreciation for STEM within the local community, the FRC website states. FRC is trademarked as “The ultimate sport for the mind.”
FIRST provides other programs as well. FIRST LEGO League [FLL] is for youth aged four to 16 and uses a smaller game area where teams score points based on their competency in completing tasks associated with the game’s theme.
Blue Crew FRC Team 6153 holds a community STEM event Wednesday evening, Aug. 14. at Western Maine Play Museum in Wilton. Pictured back row from left are Dan Labonte, Ronald Holmes, Robert Taylor, Jen Civiello, James Civiello, Jeff Bailey and Noah Civiello; middle row from left Landon Morse, Lucy Knowles, Natalie Furka and Executive Director, Western Maine Play Museum Nikki Dustin; and front row Mason Labonte [seated] and Audrey Civiello [Kneeling]. Photo courtesy of Sandra Reed, Program Coordinator, Western Maine Play Museum
Admission to the event was free. Children received a coupon for a free treat from The Frosty Paw ice cream truck of Chesterville. It included robot demonstrations by Blue Crew’s mascot R2 Blue2, according to the team’s Facebook page.
There were demonstrations given using the robot Blue Crew used in the FRC competition last year and ones used with Spruce Mountain Middle School’s FLL team last year, Rob Taylor, a Blue Crew advisor told the Livermore Falls Advertiser Sunday night. The team had met prior to the event, had built a number of robot prototypes, some using LEGO SPIKE kits, he noted.
“One had a LEGO person that danced, another had a LEGO person playing an electric guitar,” Taylor said. Members were able to show kids how to program the robots, do the coding to make them do those things, he noted.
For the event, Blue Crew received a grant from the Perloff Family Foundation [Funding educational innovation in Maine, one grant at a time, according to its website], Taylor said. Otis Federal Credit Union in Jay also funded the project, he noted.
“We gave away mini wind-up robots to everyone who came,” Taylor stated. He estimated 50 kids and more than 100 people in all attended.
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