Middle Schoolers Give City Council Their Solutions To Community Problems

NEBRASKA CITY -  Middle school-aged students from Nebraska City public and Lourdes Central gave presentations Monday at the Nebraska City City Council regarding community problem solving projects in this year’s First Lego League competition.

Deb Weitzkamp of UNL-L extension said the league challenges students to build a robot to autonomously complete as many  robotic missions  as possible in a 2.5 minute time span  on 4x8 foot challenge table.

When winter weather forced a competition in Columbus to cancel, students were invited to compete at the regional in Nebraska City.

 

Weitzenkamp: “The day before the tournament we were looking at having 330 middle school kids competing here at the high school.  And we just kind of take over the high school.”

 

This year, students were also asked to identify a community problem and present an innovative solution.

 Lourdes Robotics Team presented its project in the form of a newscast. They propose improving sidewalks using recycled rubber.

Robotics team: “They have come up with a great innovation project, would you care to elaborate?
“Some of the sidewalks in our city are broken, run down or even missing.

 

“It is hard to get around on them if you ride bikes or scooters, meaning that you have to ride in the street, which could be a safety hazard.
“If you have little kids or younger siblings like I do, bringing a stroller is even harder.”

Deane Nielson introduced the Pioneer Bots Gold, who worked on the problem of safe street crossings for pedestrians.

Pioneer Bots Gold: “We are Pioneer Bots Gold Team Number 26880. I am Blayne, this is Elizabeth, Nick, Ariel and Ethan.”

“Within our team, unfortunately, three of us have been hit by cars in the past. Fortunately they weren’t that bad.”

They propose using radio frequency identification chips, which are about the size of a grain of rice, on bikes, signs, stoplights and keychains for kids to carry around.

The radio frequency alerts are also helpful to the visually impaired.

 

The Pioneer Bot Purple Team will be headed to state competition.

Pioneer Bot Purple: “In Nebraska City we have a lot of true parts of nature, but nobody ever uses it. They are always on their phones. To fix this problem we decided to give everybody free WiFi, but you have to walk and exercise for it.”

 

Walk 4 WiFi is an app that keeps track of how far you’ve walked and gives more WiFi the farther you go.

Pioneer Bots: “We decided to reward a one-mile walk with 30 minutes of WiFi and a two-mile walk with on hour of WiFi going 30 minutes each mile you walk.”

State competition is scheduled Feb. 22 at the Strategic Air and Space Museum.