Westview’s Option 16 robotics team hosted its 15th annual FIRST LEGO League (FLL) Explore Expo, Jan 31. Each year, the team holds this event to highlight the many hours all members of Option 16 put into mentoring FLL teams across multiple elementary schools in PUSD and to spread STEM to the younger generation. Organized and led by Vice President of Outreach Caylin Nguyen (12) and Co-Outreach Coordinator Audrey Lei (10), the expo ran smoothly with 29 teams competing and around 300 total students.
Prior to the event, Lei explained the logistics of the expo and all the details that had to be prepared and managed.
“The FLL Expo is for elementary school kids who did FLL Explore throughout the competition season, from the beginning of the year to now, and they’ve been building their robots and making posters and presentations,” Lei said. “They’re going to come in and we’ll have judges from different schools evaluate these students, their robots, and their presentations. When they’re not being evaluated, there are a bunch of different demos, so we have demos of our robots, as well as some other FTC [FIRST Tech Challenge] and FLL challenge teams, and we have simpler demos like Tinkercad, Sumobots, little robots that fight each other in an arena, and Spiros, which are the spherical robots that roll around.”
During the first semester of this school year, Option 16 has been mentoring the FLL teams weekly, helping them prepare their robots and presentations for the Explore Expo.
“It’s very important that we give back to our community, and part of the reason why we do the expo is actually because every week prior to this, we’ve been hosting 11 FLL Explore teams, so they’ve been coming onto campus and we’ve been mentoring them,” Nguyen said. “Then we have teams from this program at Los Penasquitos Elementary School, BLST, and we mentor those kids over there. And then we opened it up to the general public, so we had 29 teams come on [in total].”
As a coordinator for this event, Lei said she worked together with her partner, Isaac Schwartz (9), and Nguyen to manage the preparation process and assign roles to the rest of the team.
“We take inventory of all the supplies and make sure that everything’s ready for the day of the event,” Lei said. “We made a list of jobs for all the robotic students, so they know what they’re doing, which demos they’re going to be managing, and then we printed out certificates for the students, like medals and awards. And then we’ll make plans, so in case there’s rain, we’ll have a backup plan. The day of the event, we’ll be setting up, and there’s going to be an introduction ceremony and a closing ceremony, so we’ll be responsible for giving the speeches then.”
During preparation, Nguyen said one of the challenges she faced was teaching the new coordinators how to organize the event while battling the time crunch of a little less than two months.
“One thing that’s always a little hard is that our coordinators, they are two new students,” Nguyen said. “One’s a freshman, one’s a sophomore, so it’s their first year on the team and they have no idea what this event is. This is my fourth expo now and so, of course, I know what to do. So that’s one thing that’s difficult, but it’s also a really fun challenge teaching them how to lead, how to do these things, how they work, because they’ve never done anything like this. It’s definitely a challenge because I know how to do it in my head because I was coordinating my freshman year and I’ve done it years afterwards.”
Additionally, with 56 members on Option 16, Nguyen said it was difficult to keep track of everyone and ensure a flawless expo.
“We’re a fairly large team and so the other aspect of it is also just trying to rally and organize everyone too, because again, a lot of people, there’s a lot of moving parts with this event,” Nguyen said. “There’s all the judging rooms, all the demos, and it’s a really big area and we’re always losing track of each other, so there’s definitely a lot of craziness to it, but it’s always very rewarding.”
Option 16 President Ayaan Irshad (12) said the team teaches the kids the basics of Computer-Aided Design (CAD), along with how to build and program their robots. Not only is the event and mentorship focused on STEM, but the elementary-schoolers also develop life-long skills.
“I would say it’s just a really fun event and this one is a big deal because it’s the most students we’ve had in it: 300 kids,” Irshad said. “It’s always a nice way to empower the students because we start mentoring them in September, making these little Lego builds, learning about it, and making robots, and it’s really awesome to see them practice their speaking skills, presenting, and working as a team. We teach them how to do mini CAD-ing, so just dragging rectangles and circles and joining them together. It’s a pathway, so once they do the younger ones, they can progress to the older FLL challenge and FTC, then FRC. It’s just getting them interested in STEM and getting them ready for the future.”
Although each team in the expo participates in judging, they each win an award that highlights their strengths.
“When [the students] are being judged, we have a bunch of awards like Gracious Professionalism award, Team Spirit award, Creativity award, Judges award, and the judges will assign those and give each team an award,” Nguyen said. “At the end of the day, all of them get a little award, but technically it’s different because it’s like, ‘the judges thought you guys were the most creative or you guys were the most respectful and most well behaved so then you get gracious professionalism.’”
An obstacle the robotics team came across was a time conflict between expo preparation and their own FRC competition season. Irshad said that beginning in January, they had to find a balance between both aspects, which meant pulling time out of their own schedules to make sure everything was completed as planned.
“I think [organizing] was definitely a bit difficult because this is during our competition season, which started Jan. 10, so our whole team is trying to get the robot design and get it out there and get it ready,” Irshad said. “At the same time that’s going on, we have students that are working on this and trying to get the expo prepared and done, so it’s definitely a bit difficult trying to balance all of that. We’d have to pull students out, have them go set up their rooms and make sure their demos are ready. It’s a hard balance to strike between having people that can support the robot and prepare for the event.”
Nguyen said the team continues to host the expo every year to inspire the younger generation and display their support for STEAM learning.
“With every single outreach event that we hold, our ultimate goal is to spread STEAM out to them, and so same thing with this one is two things: we hope that they had a lot of fun and we hope that we could have given them an experience they’ll remember, but then also just so that they realize they can love STEAM, and maybe they’ll come back and do it again next year,” Nguyen said.
With all the effort the robotics team has put into the expo, Nguyen said it’s always a very rewarding experience to see the joy on the kids’ faces and how much fun it is for them.
“It’s always just very rewarding seeing how happy we make the kids,” Nguyen said. “After all that hard work, no matter how hard it was, it was worth it because it turned out good for the kids, even though there’s small hiccups and stuff that we as high-schoolers and we as organizers notice, the kids don’t notice. To them, they’’re just having fun.”
