Last week two teams from Crabapple Lane Elementary School, the Robo Cardinals and the Mega Cardinals, competed in the Rock Spring Regional FIRST LEGO League Robotics Tournament. The teams not only have to build robots that run missions on a field, but also have a project.
The theme of this year’s project was Trash Trek, all about recycling. The teams had to come up with an item that needs to be recycled, or for which the existing recycling could be improved, and conceive, prototype, and present a possible solution. The Robo Cardinals (blue in the photo) won the award for Best Research on their Project. The Mega Cardinals (red) took First Place Overall at the tournament and will be going on to a Super-Regional competition in January. This follows in the footsteps of JC Booth Middle School’s World Class Warriors, who last year competed and won nationally in the same league.
The Mega Cardinals edged out 20 other teams by having a near-perfect score for their project, which was recycling of single-serve coffee pods. Their research showed that while typical coffee pods are only 5% recyclable material, billions are sold annually and end up in landfills. The Mega Cardinals proposed making a building material by sandwiching reclaimed coffee pods with adhesive between two thin panels, resulting in a lightweight but very strong, tough material. Their prototype is a door made from the material, which has weight similar to a hollow-core door, but the toughness of a solid core door without the high expense of precious timber. Other potential uses for the material include concrete forms in construction, furniture surfaces (such as desk tops), and cubicle and other partition walls. The team collected and cleaned over 1,000 coffee pods from their school break rooms and neighbors in just a few weeks to make their prototype.
