Dr. Nicole Adewale is an inspiring leader. She co-founded ABNA Engineering Inc., a multimillion-dollar structural and civil engineering design services firm with projects nationwide; holds degrees in engineering, urban affairs, and education; and has led and served on more than a dozen boards and committees advancing each of these areas. She shared with participants at Little Bit’s year-end FIRST® LEGO® League (FLL) competition on May 2 at Westview Middle School that it all began with a dream she had as a grade school student.
“Whatever your dream is—whether it’s to become an engineer or over-the-road truck driver—start seeing it in your mind, get the help you need, make plans, and you can make it happen,” she told the fourth and fifth grade students in attendance.
Dr. Adewale has been involved in FIRST, the world’s leading youth robotics community, for over 20 years and spoke to one of the organization’s core value: gracious professionalism, or competing while aiming for shared success. It’s one of the many lessons students learn during the weeks of preparation leading up to the annual robotics challenge.
“I think the biggest thing you learn is resiliency,” says Darcy Lescher, Library Media Specialist and FLL coach at Glasgow Elementary. “You’re not always going to succeed on the first try, but you have to bounce back and keep working through challenges.” Lescher says it took the team nearly four weeks to solve its first mission. By the end of the program, however, the small but mighty team of three had solved six missions, the most of any team in her three years of coaching. Their hard work paid off with the Top Score Award at this month’s FLL competition.
FLL is an international competition organized by FIRST, in which students are introduced to engineering and coding through building LEGO robots and programming them to perform a series of “missions.” Each year, Little Bit brings FLL to elementary schools in the Riverview Gardens School District, providing the materials, lesson plans, and coaching support, with help from sponsors such as LUZCO Technologies and the Suzy Esstman Charitable Fund.
At the end-of-year district competition, officials from FIRST evaluate teams on mission completions, core values, and an innovation project tied to the annual challenge theme. This year’s archaeology-inspired theme, Unearthed, introduced students to concepts of history, discovery, and hidden artifacts as they worked through their programming missions.
“Some of my students had never even heard of archaeology before, and coding experience certainly isn’t something they typically get in the classroom,” says Robert Wilkes, a fifth-grade teacher at Koch Elementary. This was Wilkes’ third year coaching the Koch FLL team, which earned the Best Innovation Project award for designing a ground-penetrating scanner to help archaeologists identify shapes that may be buried artifacts.
“We had our challenges this year, but we found success when we bonded as a team and gave everyone a say in the process,” he says. “I think that’s what it’s really about—learning to work together and appreciate what each of us brings to the team.”