Lego Robotics Team Conducting High-Resolution Survey of Norfolk Creek with ODU’s Help

Norfolk Collegiate First LEGO League Robotics team spent the last two weekends collecting and analyzing data for their regional competition and it’s bringing together Old Dominion University’s Institute for Coastal Adaptation and Resilience (ICAR) and private citizens to make it come to fruition.  

This year’s theme is SUBMERGED and it challenges students to solve a problem related to ocean exploration. The team of sixth and seventh graders competes on Nov. 16 against other schools in Hampton Roads.

They are working with ODU’s ICAR to help map a creek and then present their map to the judges as data that can help us better understand how creeks contribute to tidal flooding. Using ICAR’s BlueBoats, which are compact hydrographic survey boats, students mapped a creek in the Riverpoint neighborhood just before high tide on Oct. 20, and last weekend they worked with ICAR to learn how to process their data and turn it into the map with the help of John Klinck from ODU’s Oceanography department and Dan Perez, a PhD student at ODU. 

In addition to the data collection and coding, students are also working on coding in Python for their robotics portion of the challenge.