In early September, Peachtree Corners was contacted by Gwinnett County Public Library Learning Lab Specialist Patrick Sturgill, inquiring about a tour of the Curiosity Lab for his First Lego League Team, the BiblioTechs. The BiblioTechs FLL Team is comprised of homeschooled students from across Gwinnett County and meets at the Suwanee Public Library.
The request came on the heels of the library program conducted by City of Peachtree Corners Communications Director Louis Svehla in July, which provided Peachtree Corners Library staff with tours of the Curiosity Lab as well as an in-library presentation to the facilities youth members. .
The reason for the request? Every year FLL teams across the world are challenged to find real-world problems and create innovative real-world solutions to those problems. So, what better thing to do than tour the Curiosity Lab and immerse the students in real-life technology?
Svehla conducted tours for the coaches on September 14th, and the full BiblioTech team on September 30th. Following the tours, the students began developing ideas for their FLL competition based on the technology they had seen and narrowed down their ideas to three topics. On November 9th, the team visited the Curiosity Lab and met with Svehla to discuss their ideas and determine a final competition project.
Following the discussion, the team landed on a project entitled the Seeking and Tracking AR Wearable Vegetation Management System, or STAR Wear VMS. The project focuses on creating an environment to assist utility workers by providing an increased vision of potential hazards in the power grid. The team worked for weeks to prepare for their first round of the competition which was held on Saturday, December 10th. The competition included the presentation of the project, as well as the creation of Lego robotics that the team used in the Robot Games competition.
