By Nathan Rice, Nebraska Extension Educator: 4-H Youth Development
The Scottsbluff Robotics Club received a $12,722 grant from the Oregon Trail Community Foundation on Oct. 31 to help support the technological/equipment needs of the rapidly expanding program.
The Oregon Trail Community Foundation grant will be used to update meeting spaces with whiteboards and TV monitors to promote collaboration among team members. Funds will also be used to purchase additional robot kits and parts to ensure every team has two robot kits to practice with and extra supplies needed to problem solve/create innovative solutions. Additional computers capable of handling the computational bandwidth necessary to run the First Tech software and coding programs will be purchased. This will allow more team members to gain coding and design experience.
Four years ago, the Scottsbluff Robotics Club had only one team of eight youth. The program has continued to expand each year and now serves five teams of 42 youth across Scotts Bluff County and nine coaches. Maintaining the club’s technology with the program’s growth has been a huge struggle. Each team needs computers, robot kits, research tools, innovation project supplies, and meeting space.
Teams will also receive a cabinet to lock up their supplies and toolboxes to organize robot parts, creating a more organized workspace. Lastly, a display case to showcase the robotics club’s hard work from the last six years of competition will be placed in a foyer outside the county extension offices, allowing the public to view the accomplishments of their community’s youth.
Scottsbluff teams begin meeting in September and meet each week for two hours until the state competition in March. The FLL challenge consists of four main sections: Robot Performance, Robot Design Presentation, Innovation Project, and Core Values. The State FLL competition in March will take place in Lincoln, Neb., and consist of around 100 teams from across the State of Nebraska. The top 2 to 3 teams get bids to compete at World Tournaments across the United States. In the last two years, the Scottsbluff Robotics Club has sent three teams to World Tournaments located in Arkansas and Florida, competing against teams from over 20 other countries.
The First Tech Challenge is designed for high school students to continue their FLL career. It increases the difficulty as teams learn industry programming languages, build custom-designed parts in CAD, and use machine learning/AI to train autonomous robot missions. First Robotics releases a new challenge each year that teams work all year to complete. FTC also focuses on community outreach, with our local Scottsbluff FTC team serving as mentors and role models for our younger FLL teams. In their first year of competition, Scottsbluff’s FTC team won multiple awards at each regional tournament and earned a bid to compete in Colorado’s State Championships.
The Scottsbluff Robotics program consists of four First Lego League (FLL) Teams (ages 9 to 14) and one First Tech Challenge (FTC) Team (ages 12 – 18). The FLL program centers around teaching youth about programming and engineering through the annual LEGO challenge.
The Oregon Trail Community Foundation is dedicated to supporting projects that improve education, schools, wildlife preservation, historical landmarks, the arts, healthcare, and scientific research. The Foundation offers grants, scholarships, and other services to organizations and individuals through funds provided by donations, memberships, bequests, trusts, and other financial vehicles.