District-wide expo to highlight technological student projects

WASILLA — As talk of winning robotics teams and successful coding academies increases in Mat-Su Valley Schools, school district officials have decided it’s time for its first-ever Tech Expo.

On Tuesday, March 1, Wasilla Middle School will host hundreds of middle and high school students, parents and teachers for the Mat-Su Borough School District’s 2016 Tech Expo and High School Program Fair, where students will demonstrate the results of their “21^st century learning” in a variety of ways. People can attend a morning session from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., an evening session from 5 to 8 p.m., or both.

“There’s a lot of good things that are going on (in Mat-Su) and it’ll be great to introduce that to the community and other schools,” said Karen Olson, whose daughters will be presenting their projects at the expo.

Taylor Olson, a junior student at Twindly Bridge Charter School, suggests coming to the later session, when her championship robotics team will battle it out with schools from Fairbanks, Anchorage and Kodiak in the center of the floor.

Taylor and her sister-teammates, Sadie and Hailey Olson, are known as Frostbyte, which was recently named to Alaska’s winning alliance at the FIRST Tech Challenge Alaska State Championship for the second year in a row. That means they will be one of three Alaska teams who are again traveling to the FIRST Tech Challenge West Super-Regional Championship in Oakland, California, March 24-26.

The competition involves two randomly paired, allied teams (four total), each with a robot. Frostbyte’s prize-winning robot is called Shaposhnikova.

Taylor said the team’s 50-pound, 18-inch-square block ’bot is named for a high-skill gymnastic move conducted on the uneven bars, invented by Soviet athlete Natalia Shaposhnikova. Given that the girls are competitive gymnasts, it seemed appropriate, Taylor said.

Though the goal of each team is to accumulate points by getting its robot to perform specific functions — like climbing a “mountain” and hanging from a high bar — Taylor said the robots are allowed to interact with each other as a strategic measure.

“Some of the teams that don’t always score as many points, they can actually play defense and prevent the other alliance from scoring points,” by pushing obstacles in front of the team’s robots, she said.

But much of the competition depends on the students’ knowledge and preparation beforehand. Teams must build and program the robots themselves, with just a few materials and a list of challenges that must be completed at the competition.

That programming, Karen Olson said, requires just one of several kinds of coding done at Twindly Bridge and elsewhere in the district.

Specific to the charter school, though, is its use of coding to create prosthetic hand designs through the global company, e-NABLE. Students write the code to create the design on the computer based on individual requests, which is then filed on an SD card and inserted in a 3D printer. The printer reads the code and produces the unique hand out of a kind of plastic, layer by layer. The hand — which takes a total of about 12 hours to print in several pieces, Olson said — is then sent to e-NABLE for processing, so it can function electronically with the user’s particular condition.

The printing will also be demonstrated at the expo.

What Mat-Su Central is bringing to the event is a little more strictly digital.

In Jeff Blackburn and Jesse Cavanaugh’s coding classes, advanced students are creating calculators apps for Android phones.

While it’s a fairly simple operation, sophomore Julia Colver said it’s rewarding to see the thing in action.

“It’s just really satisfying when you push those buttons and see something happen,” Colver said.

Colver said she’s not looking to advance in the technological field, necessarily, but can appreciate coding as a lover of writing and literature.

“It’s like a different language,” she said.

Eighth-grader Patrick Imgrund said he does plan to use that language in the future as a software engineer, but added that being able to write code and understand how technology works is a useful skill for anyone to have.

“I’m really interested in technology and I think it’s a big part of our future so it’s useful to know code and what you can do with technology,” he said.

That’s why he’s excited to go to the expo on Tuesday.

“I think it’ll just be interesting to see what other schools are doing with technology,” he said.

Contact reporter Caitlin Skvorc at 352-2266 or caitlin.skvorc@frontiersman.com.