Ms. Layla Hijab Cable’s K2 class went on Saturday, June 2nd to the Olympics for Alpha Robotics competitions. The event was held at Wentworth Institute of Technology and was sponsored by IBM.

The K2 children have been building with legos most of the year. In January, they started building lego vehicles with motors and computer components. They used remote-control technology to control their vehicles. They then started programming, racing them and measuring the distance covered. They repeated the process by increasing the number of seconds and reprogramming, racing and measuring. They were able to read the distance and record each trial. They did all of these steps with a partner.

For the Olympics, they built cars to go down a ramp using gravity rather than motors. The cars were built by each team, tested, and continuously modified to stand the trip down a ramp traveling 10-40 feet.

On June 2nd, Ms. Hijab Cable led 13 children and 14 parents and grandparents in the field trip to Wentworth. The children were excited, but serious and when the ramp failed due to a technical mistake, they were disappointed. However, they showed maturity and continued racing despite the error that cost the cars to slow down due to a bump. The error was corrected but children could not retry their cars.

They all raced and measured the distance with the judge. They kept track of their scores and compared the different measurements from the trials. After watching other activities, eating lunch, and talking to Superintendent Carol Johnson, they were energized to listen to the IBM Engineer explain about Watson the Computer.

The results of the day were announced and our own Curley Team earned two awards for the 2nd and 3rd places in Junior K2 Alpha Robotics Olympics.

Sammy Waxman and Zoe Williams won for their teams, but Ms. Hijab Cable considers all the teams, winners. Hooray for the Curley K2!

– Layla Hijab Cable

The photographs below were taken by Layla Hijab-Cable, Alexandra Golby, Ann Greaney-Williams, and Zoe Williams.