Each year at the FIRST® LEGO® League (FLL) Challenge, a Breakthrough Award is presented to the team who demonstrates they understand that what they discover is more important than what they win. Danforth Elementary walked away with the award from this year’s Riverview Gardens district-wide challenge in May, a fitting recognition of the team’s determination throughout the season, says Jim Henry, team co-captain. “They were a small but mighty core group, who worked through some setbacks and showed a significant turnaround from the qualifiers in January,” says Henry, Project Management Analyst for Luzco Technologies. “I was really proud of them.”
FLL, a part of Little Bit’s academic enrichment and equity programming, is a global robotics competition that helps students understand the fundamentals of engineering as they explore real-world challenges, learn to design and code, and create robotic solutions made with LEGO bricks and electronics. Little Bit provided training, equipment, and hands-on support to six FLL teams in the last school year, and organized both the qualifiers and year-end challenge for the teams.
Luzco, a boutique engineering firm headquartered in St. Louis, has sponsored the FLL team at Danforth (made up of 4th and 5th grade boys and girls) for the past two years and has made it possible for employees to work directly with the students through their Volunteer Time Off program. Henry took on the co-captain role this past school year, along with school social worker Nile Trice, spending time each week with the team talking them through concepts of programming, how to learn from mistakes, and getting them ready for competition.
“I came into this without any child education background, so it was a learning curve, but the kids were so enthusiastic and cool to work with, we became fast friends,” says Henry, adding that the nine other Luzco colleagues who volunteered felt the same. “None of the volunteers missed their scheduled day – they enjoyed it so much – even spending time at home searching online for solutions to some of the problems the team was facing. We could tell that the students really wanted to see this through, so we wanted to provide consistent support. The volunteers became as dedicated to the program as the kids.”
Henry says the students not only significantly improved their performance at competition from the previous year (placing third overall in the spring), but overcame setbacks to do it. “We had one incident in which some other students in the school found and messed with what the team had built, so they basically had to restart. But they did it,” he says. “And, Ms. Trice was always using these experiences to help them understand their emotions in working through issues.”
Henry says Luzco has furthered its commitment to the FLL program by installing its own competition table at the office for future volunteers to train and practice on. “As a company, we know that mentoring local youth interested in STEM helps ensure the sustainability of our industry, and being founded and led by a woman, it’s gratifying to be able to show girls that they can grow up and do the same.”
To learn more about how your company or organization can get involved in supporting STEM programming in Little Bit partner schools, contact Merritt McCarthy, Senior Director of Development.
