 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Okay, bingo, we're back. I'm Jay Fidel, here we are on Think Tech, but you knew that. We're on Community Matters today, and we're talking about the upcoming Hawaii first robotic tournaments with Maria Tomei, who is deeply engaged in robotics. Yeah. Maria. Hey, how are you doing? What are you doing with robotics? Well, I personally am helping to organize the 10 district tournaments that are going to happen in November. Now, I'm not organizing all of them. I know, I am not ready for this to be the end of October, but it'll be good. And so there are going to be 10 district tournaments, and then the championship is in December, and so each tournament coordinator is pulling together their volunteers. They've got the teams lined up for the event, and so it's been very, very busy and very, very exciting. You're an engineer. Yes. I know this. Yes. So what is your relationship between your interests professionally and these tournaments? There might be. There might be. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The optimization process, getting all the right pieces to work together and make sure that it all happens right. OK. So give us the long and long of it. You know, what are these tournaments? How many people are involved? OK. Cool. What happens at them and how they work? Well, if we're going to start from the big, OK. First is for inspiration and recognition of science and technology. It's international volunteer run. So this is an international program. Yes. We're just doing Hawaii chapter. Exactly. And so every year they have a different topic, and they have a bunch of teams. And Hawaii this year has over 100 teams, and each team can have up to 10 kids. And of course, they've got their coaches and their mentors. What's 100 times 10? Well, about 1,000 plus, you know, because it's over 100, you know. But then some teams don't have 10 kids. But you've also got some schools have a lot of interest, but they can only take some of the kids on the team. So there's always more interest in their space. And these are between the fourth and the eighth grades. Yeah, very good. So if you're in kindergarten, no. Well, kindergarteners have junior first-legal day. Oh, is that right? I didn't know that. OK. They do. In fact, they're going to be at the state championship in December is going to have the junior first-legal leaders with their demonstrations at a whole section of the team. I can see it now, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So and the topic this year is water. So it's very civil engineering type focus. Topic is water. Yeah, hydrodynamics. OK, so all the robots involved has something this year to do with water. Well, the LEGO, OK, so here's, I can show you this. The LEGO models have representatives of water. This is the big water. And I think it's symbolic of groundwater or distributed water and your water distribution systems and stuff. Because you use this one to put out the fire. OK, so it's a little house that has a little thing of, looks like fire. They're all LEGO pieces. And then this one is the rain. So LEGO is plastic. Yes, LEGOs. It represents water. So we don't have actual water cannons. It's probably just as well, especially in the studio. Yes. What else you got on the table over here? OK, so this is a sample robot. Now, every team has a different robot, because they build it from the pieces. Let's zoom in if we can on that so we can see the details. Too beautiful. Yeah, and I don't want to break it. I had to kidnap it from an elementary school. And I promised that it would be back before curfew, so I got to get it back to them. It will be in the same condition they lent it. So this is the brick part, about 2 by 4, 1 and 1 1⁄2 or so. And this has the brain in it. And so when you program it, you have the instruction set from the laptop to this. And this will tell the motors to run. You can have up to four motors. This one has three on it at the moment. And it has sensors. And so you've got a couple of color sensors on this one, I think. And so what happens is the kids have to figure out, OK, I need some wheels. So they figure out which wheels are going to use, a variety of types are available. They figure out how to attach them. And then they figure out how to attach the motors and the cables and put the sensors on to do the missions. Now they also have to figure out which missions they're going to attach. First, this one has 18 this year, 18 missions. Let me get a shot of this. See, yeah. That's the listing of all the missions. That's the list of the missions. This is the really short version. But the idea is there's strategy. And you've got to work with your team members and figure out, OK, which ones are we going to go for first? And so they build this and whatever attachments. If you're going to get this to take this over to the flower. Oh, it's supposed to lift it up. It's a canister of water. There you go. Yeah. To get points for the flower mission, you have to use the big water to raise the flower. And you get extra points if there's little rainwater on the flower. I see. So how are you going to get this thing to do? So it's actually quite challenging. There are an infinite number of ways to build it, infinite number of ways to program and get it to do it, infinite number of ways everything can go wrong. Yes, but. OK, I'm making myself a fourth grader now with my other nine, potentially nine, teammates. And first thing I have to, I know the problem. I've got to get the canister of water over from one place to another. And the little one in the flower, I've got to do that. And so I have a, I guess I have a catalog of pieces. I can select my pieces. The problem is pile, generally. Piles. Or boxes. It depends how organized, you know. But, you know, you get a certain number of pieces coming into kit and there's an expansion kit. And then folks can use anything made by LEGO can be used. Ah, OK. So, yeah. So that's for the structure of it. So I can see the LEGO pieces, the total LEGO pieces. But I also see electronic pieces there, which are sort of part LEGO and part electronic. I see wires coming out of them, like Ethernet cable kind wires. Yeah, those are cables, yeah. And you said the brain. So I want to have people understand, Kiska say the brain. What is the brain? The brick is where you actually can plug in your. You're plugging in a bunch of sensors. Yes, your little USB. And you're programming it on your laptop. And you've got your, this one has three motors. Now, if you're going to steer, let's say, you start in base. It's a 4 foot by 8 foot playing space. Oops, sorry. And you start in base. And you've got to get it to move, right? So if you have your four motors, you've got to use two of them for steering, right? Because one's got to go and the other one goes backwards if you're going to turn right or left. And so they've got to figure all that out. They've got to tell the motors what to do. And then you've got the possibility of two other motors that can move things. Like those arms. Yeah, exactly. So let's say you're brainstorming. You've got your team and you're brainstorming. OK, I want to get the water there. All kinds of ideas. Can we toss it? Do you drop it? If you just drop it, let's put this flat. If you just drop it, will it be enough? No, it won't, right? You've got to push it down. You've got to tap it. Oh, wow, just tap it. Oh, that worked. So yeah, so it's a lot of trial and error and learning and experimentation. And sometimes you get very creative ideas that work one out of every 10 times. And somebody may love that idea. It worked, yeah, but it failed nine times. And so part of this whole robustness and the ability to replicate the success and the patience to test it and the willingness to say, OK, I have to allow that idea to go, start over, the resilience that it takes up with the kids. Inspiration and inspiration and all that. So let's say they got all the points. Let's make the flower happy. There we go. Now you talked about the brain. And I'm interested in the brain because I'm an old fashioned computer programmer. If then statements and case statements. Actually, it's clicking and dragging of blocks. So you say, OK, this is a motor block. And you click and you drag it. So it's drag and drop. The programming for the brain is drag and drop. It is. And then you tell it, OK, do I want 100% power going to this and for how long? And if you put 100% power on both motors equally and they're attached to the wheels, it'll just go straight, right? We can't have that. Maybe you want it. But it's something that needs to stop, right? So where do you have it stop? Now, this is where they get into the subtleties of, well, when the battery is freshly charged, it might act a little differently. That's very subtle. What if the wheels are dirty? We had one to one time, the wheels were dirty and it just wasn't turning the way it should. It just wasn't gripping. We actually practice so long with one of our robots that the wheels wore out. You know, it's like, wait, it's not working, everyone. You were able to adapt the program, recreate the program so that it could deal with dirty wheels? That's why you got to use sensors, because if you try to do everything with dead reckoning, OK, I'm going to put it, I'm going to make it, aim it directly there. And every table is probably a little different. The competition table is not the one you have in your school that you're practicing on. So you're on the team. Is that what happened? No, well, not me, not this year. Little ideas, you sit with them. No, actually what you do is you allow them to discover stuff. And you brainstorm with them. In fact, one of the core values is we learn together. You ask questions. Yeah, exactly. So if I'm a kid and I want to program the brain, to me that's the most fascinating part of this, I have to connect it up with my laptop. I have to have a laptop. And does it matter if the laptop is a PC or an Apple? Any laptop would work? I think pretty much you use the PCs, I'm not sure. That would be a question for this year's team. OK, and I have to download some kind of program, probably have to download the program so I can send signals to the brain. How is the computer attached to the brain? Yeah, I believe that's the Bluetooth. We really should have the kids here. I haven't been involved in this. We can do the live thing at the school for this type of question. And you ask the kids and they know everything. You're still asking me hard questions. Sorry, you're not really on the front line. You're on the back line. We're just trying to make sure we have the school set up and the volunteers there. And we need our three judges. I guess I compile my program somehow and I send it to the brain. Now the brain has the program. But I decide that I need to do something else with the sensors because the wheels could get dirty or the table could become bumpy. So you upload them, you make changes? So I should do it again. And then you upload it again and then you hit the start button and it'll go off and it'll do what you just did. The new one. It'll run the new program. So that's the whole iterative process. It's all about engineering and invention and perspiration and inspiration and all that stuff. They must love it. They must be so focused on this. It's a well-painted thing actually. It's very good because you're so frustrated. It's not working and then it works and somebody has an idea and so there's that reward. And then you also appreciate your other team members because they're contributing to this. Yeah, and I suppose if you're just a fly on the wall you can see how the team is functioning. You can see the leaders emerge and you can see the level of cooperation from the others. We have a graphic that talks about the different parts of this program, the triangle one. Why don't we look at some graphics, Maria? Why don't you take us for a little tour among the graphics? Okay. Okay, so this is the one that talks about it's more than just robots. The task today might be building the robot. The task tomorrow is maybe the water topics that you're learning. So that's the project, the yellow section. You're learning about a topic of importance and you're imagining a solution. And so they're envisioning that, hey, the stuff they're learning in school can be applied to important things. Ah! Yes. Exactly, right. And then the red part, the core values of teamwork and respect. So it's not just what you build, it's how you're building it. And everybody gets to play. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so it's this whole concept of the community. They have this term gracious professionalism where you have to respect- I hope some of these guys wind up running for office. But that's just a side comment. No, it's very true. You're gracious professionalism. And so when you go, when you have the tournaments that we were talking about these tournaments, they don't just show up and show how their robot can go get the points and complete the missions. That's an important part that has a lot of cheering and excitement and competition. But before that, they also have a chance to explain their project where they did research on water topics. In the tournament now. They get to express themselves. Well, yeah. They're fourth through eighth graders. And so those judged sessions are actually private. So everybody's not watching while you're just- Okay, it's too nerve-wrecking for them to say age, yeah. Are listening and reacting to their project. And then there's a chance for them to explain their robot design and the robot design judging. And then the third one is core values, which is a teamwork. They are given a task to show how they work together. You mean on the spot? Yeah. That's high pressure. So here, here's a game. Go play, you know. You watch them. Exactly. And we wrote them numerically, right? You know, and they have an opportunity to show how they solve problems. How do they work together? Do they include everybody? Do they respect each other's ideas? And so that is a very important part of this that's built into all parts of it. And you're building it into the kids. We'll give them a chance to see the benefit. They're very impressionable and it'll probably have a big long effect on their lives. We like to express ourselves too, usually about 14 minutes after the hour. So we're gonna take a short break and express some public service announcements and then we'll come back and we'll find out how the tournament works itself. Sure. That's Maria Tomei. Thank you. Right back. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. I'm Helen Dora Hayden, the host of Voice of the Veteran, seen here live every Thursday afternoon at 1 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. As a fellow veteran and veterans advocate with over 23 years experience serving veterans, active duty and family members, I hope to educate everyone on benefits and accessibility services by inviting professionals in the field to appear on the show. In addition, I hope to plan on inviting guest veterans to talk about their concerns and possibly offer solutions. As we navigate and work together through issues, we can all benefit. Please join me every Thursday at 1 p.m. for the Voice of the Veteran. Aloha. Planting all week for the day of the big game. Watching at home just doesn't feel the same. What on the list is who's gonna drive? It's nice to know you're gonna get home alive. Planning for fun and responsibility. Choose a G.G. Captain of our team. For every game day, a sign a designated driver. Okay, I told you we'd come back. We came back, you know. There's two kinds of people in the world, the follow-through people and the others. We're the follow-through kind. We come back after every break, yeah. So Maria Tomei, there's a couple of things you wanted to mention about this list of all the possible games you can play. Yeah, well, you know how we were talking about how you can learn stuff by doing? The neat thing about how they've handled the topic part of this, the Lego game piece, is that these mission models are more than just something to have on the board to interact with. They actually tell a story. For example, what story do you think is told by this action here? I love questions like that. Well, could it be that water makes the flower grow? Yeah, I beg it! I could do the fourth story any time, yeah. I think so. And so by learning what the missions require, they're also learning a little bit about the topic of the water. So there's a pipe removal. There's a broken pipe. If you're looking at water systems in communities, broken pipes are a thing. And they need to be replaced. And so there's a whole mission to take the broken piece out and put the other one there. Yeah, they've got pumps and you're adding pumps in the rain that you're supposed to make the rain come out of the rain cloud. Filters, you've got water treatment. These are different possible projects. Yeah, well on the four-foot bike for playing board, all these are the mission models that you get points for doing these things. Fountain, so when you put a big water in the fountain, a fountain, which is clear blue, it's not actual water. Yeah, I was waiting for that. Maybe you got manhole covers. You got a tripod. You have to get the inspection camera to just the right spot. I'm sure this is, you know what I'm saying. He's tricky. I mean, he's a tricky in real life too, you know? And so your sludge, move the sludge. So it's touching the visible wood of any of the six garden boxes. So I guess you're using the sludge as a fertilizer. But these wouldn't be for the same team. The team would have to select one of these missions or could they do more than one? You've got two and a half minutes to do as much as you can and get as many points as you can. So it's a strategy, right? Yeah. You know, if you're a beginning team and you're just learning how to build and program and the rules of the game, then you're probably gonna figure out, okay, which one of these gives me the most points for the least effort, you're gonna go for that first, right? If you're a sophisticated experience team, you might pick more than one or two. How many could you pick? You can't pick them out. Some do, almost all of them. Really? There's one that's kind of a waste time and anything that they could do if they finished everything else. And so you can't ever get all the points. It's a strategy as well. Exactly. And that's the negotiation piece too. You know, I've been asked to program this and figure out how to do it. And I did and by Golly and it has to get cut from the movie. I mean, you know, from the list or left to last, you know. Yeah. And you've got, let's see. The water collection, water wells, fire, slingshot. That's an interesting one. Dirty water and all you have to separate the clean water and the dirty water, which is a thing. Yeah? Yeah, that's a thing too. And the faucet, you're supposed to. Oh, that's, I see, this is the- How much time do they have to, you know, address this and try to wrap around all these things? Well, we started, you know, the season kind of starts in general, in August when school comes back. August and November is on two months. Yeah, the kickoff is the beginning of September. Okay. And that's when you get, you know, that's two months. To details. September, October is all it is. Yep, yep, yep. That's a lot of work. So, I mean, is this during the curriculum day or is this after hours? You know, it depends on the team. You know, some of the teams have, they're part of an after-school program. Some have actually been integrated into the curriculum. You know, some schools have their gifted and talented kids. You encourage that, right? That it be integrated. Well, I encourage. You know, however it works. Yeah, every team is different, you know. Some teams are convened, you know, they're Boy Scout or Girl Scout troops, or boys and girls club, or you know, something like that. Others are just, you know, or homeschool teams. We've got some homeschool teams and some are just groups of parents who get together and say, hey, let's do this. And they pull together a team and you've got an after, and kind of an after-school weekend type of activity. Yeah, so it's open, you know, all the way up. In the end, the best system will result in the best, you know, the best meeting the standards and they'll win. So you have to sort of work it back, right? You have to say, who won and what path did they follow? You know, it's not, it's not, one of the core values, it's not about what you win, it's about what you learn. Okay. Yeah. Well, how do you measure that? Well, you measure that by at the end of the season, you think back and say, wow, that was cool. That was fun. Yeah. You know, and then as you go on, next time you have a challenge of either working with people or coming up with a strategy or negotiating or, you know, building stuff with pieces in the three-dimensional realm. Yeah. You can think back, oh, yeah, we tried that, that worked. You know, so all that experience is useful in, you know, in your life. And so it's not who wins necessarily. Would you say that the lives of these kids are affected by their experience with this program? I would, yeah, yeah. Carry it forward, yeah. Definitely. Yeah. As I said, you know, kids are very impressionable. Sometimes they learn so quick, it just bottles the mind how they integrate all that information. Yeah, that's why if you want to know about the robot, you've actually got to talk to the kids. Yeah. Got more graphics. We've got some pictures from one of the tournaments last year. Yeah, okay. Just so you can see some of the excitement at the tournament. Yeah. It was last year, the topic of the animal. This is a photograph of the kids out there they are. Yeah, yeah. You can see in the middle is the table and the tall people there are the referees or yep, the head ref and some refs. Who are they? Are they people like you? Or are they some? Yeah, volunteers. Volunteers. Yeah, volunteers. Are they engineers? No. Not necessarily. Not necessarily. I mean, there are some. Engineers do tend to be attracted to events like this. And on the table, I guess I see a lot of these Lego robots, right? Yeah, each table has probably has one somewhere or what happens after the match is actually they put the, they take the robot off and there are some of the kids and the parents. Okay, they're both in the parents and they're taking the pictures. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, I guess this is during the announcement of the awards. So you can see the two tables and nobody's around at that point because it's all over. One of the winners, the champions. Yeah, I don't know why I like the champions from that. Team coming together. From that district tournament. Yeah, another winner. Four values. Another good time or what? 4th through 8th graders and some teams are like a, you know, 5th grade or 6th grade. These kids are so beautiful. They're our most valuable product. They really are. Yeah, and there's the, oh, look at that robot. Yeah, that's, that's, you can see that one. It's got quite a big thing up for it. One of the attachments there. Well, let's spring from, oh, we got a lot of pictures here. And explaining, yeah, yeah. And it's up to the kids also to explain things to the judges. Where was this? This was at UH West O'ahu. Okay, and where's it gonna be this year? Well, the 10 tournaments are all over the place. And there's one at Perl City. There's multiple venues going on at the same time. Yeah, yeah. And then it works up to sort of a pyramid at the top. Well, actually it's just the district tournaments. And so that's, you know, you pick one district tournament for your team to be at. And then a certain number of winners from each of those will be invited to attend the championship. Okay, so the winners are in a final round. Right, and so you have 42 teams in December. And, you know, as I said, over 100 teams throughout the state in November. And suppose, well, let me go through it first. So I'm on a team. I go down to a room like that, at West O'ahu, wherever it is. What's my activity at the competition? So in the morning, you and your team will be going to three different judging sessions. And it's all scheduled, right? So you're like, okay, I gotta be there at 9.15. We're gonna go present our project. It's a project, right. And then maybe at, you know, 9.45, you've got the core values activity. And then maybe at, you know, 10.15, you've got your robot design judging, where you have your robot, they have a mat with all the mission models on, there are about 10 mission models in the whole bunch. And you explain how you designed your robot, what you do strategy-wise, how you programmed it. Yes, and then- Does the judges look at the actual code? They bring, very often, they'll actually have it printed out. Now, there's not always time. This is all five minutes to explain your robot and strategy. And then you can demonstrate, you know, you pick your favorite mission and you show off your robot, yeah. You show it off and then the judges are rating it. They have rating sheets and- Yeah, but it's really, it's a rubric, it's a rubric. Yeah, so, you know, was the robot, for example, there's a robustness category, you know, does it stay together well? There's a thing falling apart every time somebody touches it, you know. The programming side, the strategy side, you know, on the project, they're required to research a problem related to water in Hawaii. You know, did they do research? Did they talk to experts? Did they possibly go on field trips? And letting them tell you how much research they did. Yeah, and then if they had an idea, did they research, is it done yet? What will it cost? What's involved? Do you have to, you know, distillate the laws of physics for the stork, right? SimCity. Exactly. So the entrepreneur, right. Could you develop it? If so, what would it take, you know? Okay, so now these kids go up the pyramid. Oh, well then you get lunch. Don't forget. Don't forget lunch. Okay, so then after that- You can't do a calculation like this without lunch. Yes. It's sort of a gratification thing. The judges too. Okay, so after everybody gets lunch, right, then you start the part of the program that has to do with the robot competition. Actually operate the robots. Yeah. That's really, to me, if I was to judge that, I mean, you know, where the rubber meets the rubber. Can you have to be a referee? Referee. Those are the referees. Yes, so each table has two referees. Okay kids, let me see what you can do here. Teams are all scheduled. Okay, I'm first up, you know, so- Start the bubble machine. Let's see what you can do. Two team, two members of the team will go up to the table and get the robot all set up. They'll check that everything's proper. If there's a model that's built wrong, you know, let's say this thing was built wrong and it, oops, and it wouldn't, or the rain is missing, whatever. The kids actually have to inspect the playing board before they start because they're responsible to make sure everything is in working order because if they don't do it and then something doesn't work, they didn't check it. They had to check- It's possible. Exactly, so that's- It's like a pilot checking out the plane in advance. Yeah, so they check everything, make sure it's all good, and then there's a countdown. Ta-da-da-da-da-da. And then they go ahead and start and the robot moves out of the base area and goes and does its thing and comes back and they manipulate, they take off attachments, they take off pieces, they add things, they send it out again. And then the other teams are watching this, too. Yes, yes, yes. And after two, and parents, it's public in the afternoon. The after lunch part is public. So after two and a half minutes of very high intensity, cheering, groans sometimes. Sometimes it doesn't work, right? Yeah, the one thing you thought would be perfect is didn't do it. Sometimes there was one year where you had to throw the soccer ball into the, anyway, that was one where if it made it in, you'd hear tons of cheers, it was one of those. Yeah, so after two and a half minutes of all that excitement, it's like, okay, it stops me and everybody steps back and then they look at what's, is the flower up or down? Well, you wouldn't get points if it's down, but you get the points if the big water made it go up. This is really interesting because you can make it easily. You can program it on a drag and drop. So you're giving these kids, you're empowering them, you know? I mean, the idea of having machinery respond to you in that way, it's the sense of empowerment that you can actually make peace with the tech world around us and all that and you can become a professional doing it. Maria, I'm so glad you do this. Thanks. This is good for you and it's good for energy. I know you care a lot about that. And it's good for these kids and therefore our community. And I want to show you something though, okay? We here at Think Tech, we also are empowered. Oh yeah. And we have systems and machines that will respond to what we ask. So for example, when I say the show is over and we're going out, watch this.