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Peter and Annalina Kazickas' final meeting of the trip to Lithuania was with the Academy of Robotics in Vilnius to learn about their initiative and discuss future partnerships with Basketball Power as it seeks to expand into the coding and programing area. That led to Academy of Robotics inviting KFF grantee Ariogala Day Center "Ariogalos tėkmė" representatives, a team of five students to be guests at the Vilnius Regional FLL competition in OZAS, X-Planet.
The students were given a mission to come up with a plan "to rescue pandas stranded in a forest after a disaster struck." The team had to work together in order to present the plan with a set of actions, tools and technology to be used, with a condition, that natural environment will be respected and pandas will not be put in destress.
Ariogala Day Center will be first of 16 KFF sponsored Basketball Power program's centers to be learning robotics. The plan is to equip all 16 centers with Lego Robots and have their student leaders trained so they could participate in National FLL competitions and beyond.
The Academy’s desire for a ‘revenge of the nerds’ resonated well with the belief that technology continues to be the future and that it’s important - and arguably necessary - for children to be introduced to this at a young age. Kids build the environment and robots with legos, and then use programming and coding software to direct their commands onto the ‘field,’ In fact, it was hard to not get distracted by the 6 year olds programming robots to follow their commands in the room next to our meeting.
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