Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

education:

Sumo robot clash serves to inspire young minds

UNLV SAGE Sumo Robots

Paul Takahashi

Benjamin Lither, 12, makes modifications to his “sumo robot” on Wednesday, July 27, 2011. Lither is a student in UNLV’s Summer Advanced Gifted Education program, a three week program for gifted students in the Valley.

UNLV SAGE Sumo Robots

Benjamin Lither, 12, smiles as his Launch slideshow »

SAGE a bright spot for UNLV

A record 162 students were accepted into the UNLV SAGE program this summer. Applicants had to have a 3.3 GPA and SAT scores above 500 on math and critical reading.

The average class size is 15 students. Popular courses might see up to 18 students. Tuition is $875 per student, which includes meals and textbooks.

Upon successfully completing a SAGE course, students can earn up to three college credits, as well as high school enrichment credit.

About two-thirds of students at SAGE this summer received $83,000 in financial and merit scholarships to attend. Scholarship sources include UNLV colleges and departments, the UNLV President’s Office, the Clark County School District, NV Energy, Wells Fargo, the Latin Chamber of Commerce, the Kiwanis Club of Las Vegas and the Davidson Institute of Talent Development. Villanueva expects about a third of his SAGE students to attend UNLV. All of the 650 SAGE graduates since 2005 have gone on to college, he added. Graduates have attended prestigious colleges such as University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University and Washington University at St. Louis.

“Unfortunately, when people sometimes talk about UNLV and Nevada education, we’re hearing about budget cuts, faculty leaving and fewer majors,” he said. “I definitely don’t want to downplay that, but I think SAGE is standing out as one of the success stories at UNLV.”

In a city known for its Ultimate Fighting Championship bouts and boxing matches, it’s not unthinkable that Las Vegas could host the Japanese sport of sumo wrestling.

A sumo match between miniature robots, that is.

On Friday, robotics students at UNLV’s Summer Advanced Gifted Education (SAGE) program will fire up their autonomous, battery-operated creations and set them loose on each other until the opposing robot is flipped over or pushed out of the ring.

The competition is the finale of the three-week summer academic program for gifted middle school students in instructor Jeff Markle’s robotics class.

“I’m hoping this will expose them to the field of engineering and get them thinking about the discipline as a possible career path,” said Markle, who during the academic year serves as lab director for UNLV’s mechanical engineering department. “Robots have the potential to spark interest.”

Markle’s class is one of 17 courses — from chemistry and robotics to Jane Austen and Chinese — being taught this summer at the SAGE program for middle and high school students in Southern Nevada. Started in 2004, SAGE is one of several gifted programs in Southern Nevada, but the only one that offers college credit, according to founding Director Daniel Villanueva.

“The idea is to give students a college-level experience with college-level instructors, college-level texts, college-level expectations and then also give them college credit for completing the course,” said Villanueva, a German professor with UNLV’s Honors College.

Opportunities for gifted students are few, according to Villanueva. He came to UNLV in 1999 from Duke University, where he taught at its Talent Identification Program for gifted students.

“There are not enough gifted resources and programs here,” Villanueva said. “The Davidson Institute (for profoundly gifted students) is a great program for Northern Nevada. But when we started, we were the only program in Southern Nevada serving the gifted community outside of the School District.”

The Clark County School District has its own programs, the largest of which is the Gifted and Talented Education program that serves 5,318 students. That program offers third- through fifth-graders 150 minutes of specialized instruction each week.

However, there wasn’t a specific gifted program for middle and high school pupils. So in 2009, the School District sought and received $600,000 in federal funding to start a $2.5 million academy for highly gifted students, according to Kristine Minnich, the district’s director of quality assurance.

However, plans for the gifted school were tabled amid budget cuts, Minnich said, and the School District partnered with UNLV’s SAGE to give gifted students at the secondary level more challenging educational opportunities. As part of the partnership, the School District awarded for the first time $62,125 in scholarships for 71 Clark County students to attend SAGE this summer.

“Since the school never happened, we used part of that ($600,000) earmark money for students to take classes at UNLV’s SAGE academy for either high school or college credit,” Minnich said. “We’re excited we had the opportunity to do it.”

One recent afternoon, SAGE students in Markle’s class puttered about his college lab, assembling “sumo robots” using the Lego Mindstorm kit.

The popular toy maker launched the programmable robot kit consisting of Lego parts, motors, sensors and a minicomputer in 1998, pioneering robotics education for children and spawning a generation of robotics hobbyists.

“The goal is to introduce what engineers would be doing working on spacecraft or designing the world’s tallest structure,” Markle said of the robotic kit. “To demonstrate the design process … and see what solving complex problems is like.”

The SAGE students were given several parameters in creating their robot wrestlers. They must be made from one Lego Mindstorm kit and a few steel plates, weigh no more than 2.5 pounds and fit on a normal-size sheet of paper.

Students, working in groups of two and three, must use the math and computer skills they learned in their lectures to design and program the robots to seek each other out, detect where the edge of the ring is and attack opposing robots using sensors and motors.

Toward the end of class, excited students gathered around the match ring, testing their robots against their peers’. They cheered and laughed after a win, and the losers … well, they rushed back to their desks to make modifications.

Markle smiled as he looked about his classroom abuzz with creative activity.

“I played with a lot of Legos as a kid, but I didn’t have an opportunity like this,” he said. “This is fun.”

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