North Kingstown sixth graders set to represent Rhode Island in Houston this month as part of national LEGO league competition

Lego may seem like a childhood toy, but to these 6th grader students of North Kingstown middle schools, they are anything but childish.

This North Kingstown team, the Arrr-tists, are a branch of the First Lego League (FLL). It is a national program designed to, as mentioned on their website, “introduce science, technology, engineering, and math to children ages 4-16, through fun, exciting hands-on learning.”

The Arrr-tists are a robotics team of five sixth graders. This is the second year that they have competed and have won 1st place in the Rhode Island State Championship in January, and are now continuing to the FIRST Championship in Houston, Texas in April.

Andrew Orsi, Co-Coach of the team, is an engineer from Portsmouth who began coaching the team because of his own daughter’s excitement about a robotic camp.

“This story started four or five years ago when the NK high school hosted a robotics camp that got my son excited about it,” Orsi said. “So, I started a First Lego League team, and seeing them compete prompted my daughter to go ‘Hey, can I have a team too?’ so we ended up starting a team for her.”

She wasn’t alone.

“They are a very impressive group of girls,” Orsi says of the Arrr-tists.

Each year has a theme, and this year’s theme was the ocean; Orsi says that the themes are broad and are centered around, “an idea to help researchers in their efforts intentionally. They leave the topic open, they want kids to get inspired themselves and find their own paths. For what I’ve seen for a few years now, it seems to be as much as the process and the journey as it is the outcome. It is able to show that you went through a disciplined process, take notes and have experiences that build on that effort.”

The First Lego League has four categories:

* The Robot Game: where teams program a Lego Spike robot in order to complete tasks and compete against other teams to score the most points. The Arrr-tists’ robot ‘Girls Rule’ currently scores 360 points out of a possible 550.

* The Innovation Project: where teams present an innovative idea to the yearly theme. The Arrr-tists’ innovation idea is SHELDON (Sustainable Heroic Environment Loving Determined Oceanic Novelty), an automated robot that filters microplastics from water.

* Core Values: where judges evaluate teams on fun, good sportsmanship, teamwork, discovery of new ideas, and impact of their work.

* Robot Design: where judges evaluate each team’s robot game design process.

The Arrr-tists’ other Co-Coach, Dr. Jenna Morton-Aiken from Brown University, focused on the innovation project, while Orsi spent his time on the robot side of things.

To get ready for this project, The Arrr-tists performed interviews on local oceanographers and PHD students.

“Once they found out about some problems, and picked their problem, they brainstormed solutions for it,” Orsi said. “They flushed out details and figured out different ways to solve it.”

The Arrr-tists had a blast with the work, even though they were tackling weighty subjects.

When asked about the biggest challenges they faced, members of the team all looked at each other.

“Well, the coding was really easy,” said one girl. Another team member asked out, “Wait, what was that thing called again? That was hard.” Her teammate interjected, “The Mega Loop!”

The Mega Loop? An Arrr-tist answers, “The Mega Loop had like, three different missions. It was a lot of big points for us. It made up a third of our score, and we went through a lot of challenges trying to get it right. But I’ll never forget the look on the other team’s faces when we won and they realized we mean business.”

One of the girls says of the biggest successes in this process was that “we put in the work and the hours, and we realized we could win this thing.”

They usually have a two hour meeting, two times a week. At least 50 hours a week, to which a team member says, “No, like 100 hours.” Her friend responds, “Wait, are we counting sleepovers?”

“We don’t work at sleepovers.”

Their energy and comradery is a testament to their core values of friendship, and teamwork. Speaking on this, one team member said “Our biggest win is just becoming better friends over the course of these two years. Before we knew each other, but now that we’re on a team together we’ve been through so much.”

Their creation of “Sheldon,” the innovation wheel, is based on a giant water wheel that collects trash in the water. One of the Arrr-tists says, “we did a lot of research, watched documentaries, read articles, and every time we came back to this problem of microplastics in the water. We talked to a professor in Germany who collects fossil samples in the ocean whose samples are constantly getting mixed up and kill populations, damage equipment, and ruin data collection overall. It was such a problem that we decided to do something about it.”

Their invention hypothetically goes to work in the rivers in RI. It is a contraption with, as a member explains, “has little filters that collect and filter water. The water passes through these filters, while the microplastics stay in the chamber.”

When they were recognized nationally for this achievement, and learned that they would be going to compete on a big stage in Houston, they felt “stunned.”

“At the end of our competition we received our awards and went running to where our families were,” one team member said. “I was so full of joy, it was amazing; it was just really special.”

The girls, after this competition, whether they win or not, hope to continue improving on their project and working to create change in the world.

“At our last competition we were recognized for core values of teamwork and fun,” a member said. “I think it is one of our strengths; our team just flows. When we go to this competition, and if we can represent RI as the awesome place it is, then I have no doubt it will be an awesome experience. Even if we come back with no trophies, we will come back with something great.”