NAP- Neighborhood Alliance of Pawtucket

Some local teens give state/city officials a helpful lesson

Feb 22, 2005

Battle Bots Joel Furfari

PAWTUCKET -- "A medieval siege weapon, but with a modern flair" is how Antonio Silva describes the robot built by a team of students from Tolman High School.
The core group of 10 students completed testing their robot -- nicknamed "Regit Namlot," or Tolman Tiger backwards -- and will enter it into the FIRST Regional Competition on March 10 at the Hartford Civic Center in Hartford, Conn.

FIRST, which stands for For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, was founded by inventor Dean Kamen.

Silva, a science teacher at Tolman and one of two advisors to the project along with David Pasquariello, said the robot building has given the students valuable hands-on engineering experience.

"It?’s incredible," he said. "It?’s applied math, applied physics, applied geometry. It?’s everything they?’re learning in school, but they?’re applying it. I was impressed with the level of work that these kids are doing."

Regit will be teamed up with three other robots and compete against another team to pick up the most three-dimensional triangles and deposit them in various goals placed around a playing field.

"You have to build an alliance (with teammate robots) and play off each other?’s strengths," Silva said.

This is the first competition for the Tolman team after it received a $10,000 sponsorship from defense contractor Raytheon. Cooley Group, a Pawtucket-based synthetic materials manufacturer, donated a work space at its facility on Esten Avenue and allowed the team to use its computer.

"They donated well over $10,000 worth of help to us," Silva said. "They?’ve been incredibly supportive of us."

The Tolman robot weighs 130 pounds and is five feet tall, Silva said. The robot also has a vertical reach of nine feet and uses materials ranging from aluminum tubing and an electric motor, to reels and pulleys.

If the team is successful in Hartford, it will advance to the national finals at Atlanta?’s Georgia Dome in April.

Silva said he and Pasquariello let the students guide the project?’s overall direction with as little help as possible.

"It?’s all about the students," he said. "It?’s about them coming up with ideas to solve problems."



Douglas Hadden

PAWTUCKET -- This week it's been the younger generation that has been giving city officials an education.
Tuesday, two seventh-grade science students from Seekonk showed the Pawtucket Water Supply Board the results of an extensive project they documented in text, charts and photographs, on how rain affects the PWSB watershed.

And Wednesday, students in Michael Connolly's civics class at Shea High School told the City Council about their hands-on voting project.

The Shea juniors and seniors not only enlisted most students as well as teachers to take part in a mock election, but also signed up actual new voters at Shea who participated in the real thing last fall.

The Shea voter project evolved from City Registrar Ken McGill's ceaseless efforts to sign up new voters in the city, including going to the high schools to snag under-represented 18-year-olds.

Connolly "took it one step farther," teaching students about democracy, issues, and the importance of students' right to vote, McGill said.

"And I got one 18-year-old (Shea student David Steele) to be a poll worker at Baldwin School. I think it shows they are interested in what our future holds. They are our voters of the future."

Connolly told the council, "There's a need for students to connect with the community they live in."

He said his 25-student class translated McGill's voting materials "into the language of the students in the school," including Spanish. He said voter awareness was particularly important at Shea, where "we've got so many immigrants."

After the election, Connolly said, "they wrote up what they learned and did a newsletter" reporting the results.

As for the final tally, the mock presidential election differed sharply from the national outcome: 86 percent for Democratic Sen. John Kerry vs. 14 percent for Republican President George W. Bush.

Two referendum-style questions were also on the ballot. One asked if it would be fair to revoke, for anyone under age18 caught drinking and driving, their driving privileges until age 21.

The other was whether surveillance cameras in the school were a good idea. Showing they weren't liberals on all matters, students came down in favor of both ideas.

To entice their peers to the mock poll, Connolly's students resorted to modern marketing.

"We made pins," to be given out to those who voted, related student Demettrious Dawkins, "so other students would want to vote too."

The students also said they learned that who is elected to office can directly affect their lives on issues from jobs to Social Security.

Besides Dawkins, other students on hand to receive council resolutions lauding their efforts were Luis D'Oliveira, Jose Burgo, Patrick Ribeiro, Alex Acosta, Natasha Lubo, Sonia Rodrigues, Victoria Campos and Anita Ramirez.

"We're all richer," City Councilor John Barry praised the students, "for what you did."

They also set an example their peers would do well to follow: McGill said while he boosted the number of 18-year-olds registered in the city from 70 to 750 in a year, "only 28 percent voted."

At PWSB, 13-year-olds William Clerx and Joseph Paquette of St. Margaret School put on a 10-minute demonstration that saw them sharing speaking roles like two newsroom pros at the anchor desk.

Their project -- "How does rainfall affect drinking water?" -- was supervised by science teacher Donna Cook and won a top prize at their school science fair.

Their background reading included professional resources like the American Water Works Association's Web site, but the heart of their research went right to the source, with help from PWSB's water quality manager, Allen Champagne.

The student pair over 8 weeks conducted weekly samplings at five spots along PWSB's 3,000-acre watershed, from Arnolds Mills in Cumberland to the taps at the water plant. The water sample testing included for how rainfall affected turbidity (muddiness), color, water temperature and Ph.

"It stands for potential hydrogen," William explained matter-of-factly.

With their 16-page report in a three-paneled display behind them, the middle-schoolers reported that turbidity rose particularly after quick rainshowers that induced rapid runoff, and that snow and air temperature affected water temperature much more than rain.

Their overall conclusion: The more PWSB can protect its watershed, particularly from runoff, the better.

The next project for William, the son of Francis and Marco Clerx, and Joseph, son of Donna and Michael Paquette, all of Seekonk, will be to enter their project in their upcoming state science fair.