Lego League Team Advances to State Tournament

This entry was posted on Monday, January 23rd, 2012

The Bacteria Busters, Tipp City’s 2011 Lego robotics team, will be advancing to the state tournament for their second straight consecutive year. This year, the teams were required to build, test, and program a robot using Legos to solve a set of food safety missions. In addition to the robot, they also completed a research project and provided a solution to a real world problem related to food safety.

 

The Bacteria Busters received the first place Champion’s Award at the regional tournament held at Sinclair Community College in December. They advanced to the district tournament recently held at Central State University. The Bacteria Busters were considered for the Champion’s Award again and were one of six teams to receive an invitation to the state tournament. The top 36 teams in the state will be competing at the Nutter Center on February 5^th. The robot competition is open to the public.

 

For their research project, the Bacteria Busters worked with the Angel House orphanage in Tanzania, Africa to improve their dish-washing process. They currently lack clean water and electricity to heat the water. The bacterium clings to food particles that remain on the dishes resulting in contamination and, ultimately, infectious diseases.  The team’s goal was to find cheap, low power solutions to solve this problem. They utilized a bio-sand filter for water purification. This filter has no moving parts, requires little maintenance, and is cheap to make. To solve the heating problem, they used cheap black irrigation hose and solar radiation. With direct sunlight, the hose can heat water to 150 degrees within a few hours. Together, these systems can provide clean, hot water for a few hundred dollars. The team shared the results with Mrs. Holly Heyroth Opundo, Director of the Angel House orphanage, who was excited to further pursue this idea as it could greatly improve the health of the children in Tanzania. The team also worked directly with Tammy Green at Tipp City’s LT Ball cafeteria and Tipp City United Methodist Church.

 

By learning about the problems that exist in Tanzania, the team has gained a great appreciation for their quality of life here in America. They recently sent a care package to a child at the orphanage where each team member wrote a letter and donated an item that was special to them. The team plans on continuing their work with the orphanage by developing a prototype for their idea in the spring.

 

The Bacteria Busters are currently competing for the FLL Global Innovation award. You can vote for their project once per day on-line at http://fllinnovationaward.firstlegoleague.org/bacteria-buster between now and March 1. The winning team will be offered the opportunity to work with Edison Nation to professionally develop, produce, and take their invention to market.

The Bacteria Busters are sponsored by Brilligent Solutions, Inc. and the Tippecanoe STEAM Boosters. For more information on the Angel House orphanage, please contact Holly Heyroth at holly.heyroth@gmail.com or the Grassroots Ministries at www.grassrootsministry.org.