Superintendent Justin Bartholomew has announced that students on the District’s FIRST Lego League Team took a field trip to the Plum Island Museum of Lost Toys and Curiosities to learn more about marine pollution as part of ongoing research for the Team’s Innovation Project.
FIRST Lego League (FLL) is a pilot program introduced into PRSD this school year for elementary students as a pipeline to the First Robotics @ Pentucket (FR@P) program. The FLL team currently consists of students in Grades 5 and 6 from all three district towns. The team is led by Head Coach and parent volunteer Liz Jones and General Manager of all of PRSD FIRST Robotics programs Mo Elhelw.
After participating in FLL, students will join the Middle School FIRST Tech Challenge team and then eventually the High School FIRST Robotics Competition Team.
FIRST Lego League introduces students to STEM topics through hands-on learning opportunities. The program consists of four different components participating schools must complete:
- Core Values, which teaches students teamwork and collaboration skills as well as sportsmanship.
- The Robot Game, where students design and build a LEGO Spike Prime robot to complete as many challenges as possible in 2 minutes and 30 seconds.
- A technical interview, where students have to explain their design decisions and demonstrate how they use the engineering design process.
- The Innovation Project, where students have to solve a real-world problem related to the year’s theme through research and connection with industry professionals.
This year’s Innovation Project theme is about the ocean and how technology affects our interactions with it. Pentucket students are focusing their Innovation Project on how human pollution in the Merrimack River affects nearby ocean outlet communities.
For their project, students are developing a concept for a system similar to amber-alert that would take pollution hazard inputs from multiple warning systems and alert everyone in downstream communities that will be impacted.
Students identified that, currently, individual citizens need to enroll to receive warning notifications from their municipality to know when there is untreated waste water dumping into the Merrimack River. They came up with a solution that would look at the river as a whole ecosystem and would consider pollution hazards from the entire watershed and all upstream communities and then notify everyone along the river who could be impacted.
Students have been completing rigorous independent research. Additionally, local parent and marine biologist Jill Carr spoke to students about water monitoring technology and her work to protect the river. Later in November, a Bagnall School teacher who studied marine biology will visit students to talk about habitat stabilization in Boston Harbor.
On Saturday, Nov. 2, students visited the Plum Island Museum of Lost Toys & Curiosities in Amesbury to learn more about the impact of marine pollution.
During the visit, students participated in a scavenger hunt set up for them by a museum curator.
Students were also able to visualize the amount of trash affecting the waterway through museum displays. One of the displays was made of trash collected from a half-mile strip of Plum Island at the mouth of the Merrimack River. Given that the river has about 200 miles of coastline in Massachusetts, the display allowed students to visualize the larger-scale impacts of pollution.
On Wednesday, Nov. 6, the students will continue their research with a visit from Rocky Morrison of the Clean River Project, a nonprofit dedicated to cleaning the Merrimack River. Morrison will speak to students about the work the organization does to pull debris, including cars and illegally dumped materials, from the river.
“It is so great to see these students so engaged in real-world problems and recognize the impact they can have,” said Elhelw. “Their curiosity and passion brings me great hope for the future of Pentucket’s robotics program.”
“At PRSD, we strive to provide learning opportunities for our students that prepare them for a future while allowing them to explore potential fields of interest,” said Superintendent Bartholomew. “I am proud to see these students commit themselves to something they are passionate about, and I am eager to see the brilliant work they produce as a result.”
