The Alternative Press

The FIRST LEGO League team Landroids' "Deer Avoidance" research project won the 2010 eCYBERMISSION 8th grade Regional 1st Place Award.

eCYBERMISSION is a web-based, national science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) competition sponsored by the U.S. Army. A team of 3 to 4 students, in grades six through nine, may submit their research projects online, in the areas of Sports and Recreation, Environment, Renewable Energy and Health and Safety, to be judged by a panel of virtual judges. This year, more than 13,200 students competed for the regional awards to solve a problem in their local communities. Out of more than 3,300 teams, only 96 teams (3%) were chosen for an award. The 1st place winner from each region of each grade in the country, will then compete again for the national winner title.

Landroids' spent 6 months since September 2009 in developing the Deer Avoidance research project, noting that deer related vehicular accidents is a fast growing safety problem in NJ and across the country. The team proposed to use car tire noise as passive sonar to detect roadside deer, then send out a warning signal to the drivers. A core team of four Landroids 8th grader members from Heritage Middle School, Karlin Yeh, Stanley Cheung, Gage Farestad and Brian Lee continued the weekly experiments and research effort, learning LabView, the fundamentals of sound waves and electronics components to test out the hypothesis.

The eCYBERMISSION is a more formal science research contest than the FIRST LEGO League (FLL) project presentation. Where FLL encourages creativities and out-of-the-box thinking, the eCYBERMISSION requires forming hypothesis, conducting experiments and survey, analyzing the data, drawing conclusion and then developing an application. Landroids attended weekly eCYBERMISSION webcasts to learn about various scientific methods to conduct their research. When the school had snow days in February, the team had braved the snow storms to meet and worked together the entire day, meticulous poured through their web entry folders, taking turn to review each other's work and data.

The Executive Deputy to the Commander of US Army Research, Development and Engineering Command (RDECOM), Mr. Gary Martin has personally called to congratulate the team. Each Landroids research member will receive a $3,000 EE Savings Bond, with paid travel expenses to Baltimore, MD to compete for the national winner title from June 21 to June 26, 2010. An additional $5,000 EE Saving Bond will be award to each member of the 1st place National Winners, or $3,500 to each member in the national finalist teams. Meanwhile, in March, 2010, Landroids was also one of the 92 nominations in the country for the 2010 Grand Stories Challenge sponsored by the National Academy of Engineers (NAE) for their Beach Erosion project. This project, which proposed using wave energy to self-replenish the beaches, was a 1st place Champion Award winning project at the 2009 FLL US Open.