Colette Vavrus (left) and Taylor Redd celebrate their robotic car’s parking success. Photos by Jerry Lower/The Coastal Star
By Emily J. Minor
In a bright, sunny classroom — the bright part being the students themselves — two seventh-grade girls are exploding in joy. Arms thrown over their heads, smiles wide, little beige uniform skirts flouncing as they bounce, these two have just done something most of the other kids are still scratching their heads over.
Their computer-programmed robotic car went straight, made a right and parked — perfectly — in the masking-tape parking spot right up against the classroom wall.
“This was about our 15th try, so it was very exciting,” said Taylor Redd, 13, a student in the robotics class taught by Shawn Harahush and his sidekick, Glenn Harland, at Gulf Stream School.
“It was A LOT of trial error,” said her partner, Colette Vavrus, 12.
You wouldn’t think a gaggle of 12- and 13-year-olds would get all psyched up about science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Education bureaucrats call those fields STEM for short.
But in this fifth-period class, kids have been known to stay after the bell. “Where did the time go?” Mr. Harland himself exclaimed on a recent Wednesday. Sure, these students will be driving in a few years. They’re discovering puppy love. High school, and a whole new school campus, isn’t far off. But there was one of them the other day, on her hands and knees, looking for the Lego piece she’d dropped on the classroom floor.
With bags of the click-together plastic toys that a lot of them played with as young children, students are learning how to use math, science, engineering and plain old logic to make their robots do what they’re supposed to do. A system called Lego Mindstorms, a computer program and the two lovable teachers help this process along.
“At first, some of them say, ‘I don’t think I can do this,’ ” said Harahush, a self-avowed technology geek and a math teacher at Gulf Stream. “Then they start plugging away and trying things, and they start figuring it out.”
ABOVE: Teacher Glenn Harland helps Kelly Coughland and William Conder with their programming commands.
The robotics class that Harahush and Harland, the science-teacher part of this team, run at Gulf Stream is mandatory, but there are no grades. At first, say the students, they weren’t sure they wanted to give up their study hall time for this.
Now, of course, these two are everyone’s favorite teachers.
Harahush says he found the program a few years back on a YouTube video, and was immediately amazed because one of the students — a college kid, he thinks — had built a robot that could solve a Rubik’s Cube. As Harahush tells the story, he looks at student Serena Martin, 12, as if to say she might someday be that college kid.
“If I do that, it will be a complete accident,” she assured him.
With computer software that’s included in the kit, these students wire their robots to distinguish colors. (Follow the black line, not the red one.) The robotic vehicles turn, stop, back up, all programmed by the kids themselves.
And it’s the buddy system, so it’s all about teamwork — and range of motion, proportional reasoning and axis programming. (Whatever that is.)
“Right now, we’re just trying to get it straight, but it keeps turning because the power levels are different,” said Sophia Bourguignon, 12, explaining this so nonchalantly it’s as though she’s discussing a sale at Old Navy.
There are about a dozen kids in the class, most of them girls, which means Henry Chardack, 12, is sorely outnumbered — a little something he’s used to.
“I’ve been [in class] with every single one of these girls for nine years,” Chardack said. “And they’re just better organized.”
Him? “I’m just really good at building things,” he said.
And humble, too.
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