COLUMBIA Neatly organized boxes of tiny Lego parts were scattered across tables as students tried to assemble the tiny plastic parts into robots on a recent Sunday at the Family Impact Center.

The FIRST Lego League Illuminatix Training Camp is a free robotics program that teaches kids how to design, build and program robots to complete small tasks or missions. FIRST is an acronym for For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology.The students work in pairs to complete the challenges at their own pace. If they need assistance, high school students who are part of the Army Ants robotics team are there to help. The Army Ants team uses the camp to reach potential future members.

The camp aims to promote science, technology, engineering and math education through robotics in the central Columbia community, where many families are migrants or refugees from Africa. All the kids in the camp this summer were recruited from Grannys House, a local after-school program that is staffed by volunteers from Columbia churches and campus Christian groups. The publicity of the camp is meant to raise money to buy robotics kits so the kids can start their own official team.

"It's great for them to get first-hand experience with engineering, Chengli Wang, head coach for the robotics camp, said.

Aimable Nshimiyimana, 18, and his younger sister, Francoise Uwamahoro, 10, are attending the camp for their first time this summer and have been working on assembling their robot together, poring themselves over an instruction manual and comparing the pictures to their pile of plastic parts.

Nshimiyimana said he knew he wanted to join the camp right when he first learned about it.

"I love art," he said. "I do all kinds of art. I like constructing stuff with my hands."

The camp is in its second year and has 17 students all from Africa. Some have lived in Columbia for only three or four months, Wang said. All of the students can speak English but their parents cannot.

Ellis Ingram, a retired professor from the MU School of Medicine whose wife, Pam Ingram, founded Granny's House, helped with the camp by going door to door with a translator and passing out applications to parents in the Family Impact Center's neighborhood.

"He treats all of the kids like his own," Wang said. "They call him Poppie."

The facility has two large tables set up with themed obstacle courses for the robots to go through. Each table has 10 missions a robot can be programmed to complete. The more missions it can finish, the more points it will earn in a competition.

At the Animal Allies table, robots must be able to perform tasks like moving around a shark in a tank or pushing a crank around a cow farm to get little pieces of Lego milk to come out. But if the crank is pushed too far, Lego pieces of manure will fall out, and the robot will be deducted points for its mess.

Wang said the tables are a great way to get kids interested in robotics because they like the fun designs.

"That's a good start to get kids in the door," Wang said.

Camp mentors Alice Tang, Teresa Tang and Louise Schule who are former members of FIRST Lego League Illuminatix team 4358 volunteer to help the kids learn to program their robots. Teresa Tang and Schule are both part of the Army Ants team and build large, industrial size robots with steel or aluminum to perform complex tasks like picking up large gears, shooting balls or climbing ropes.

A couple of the other volunteers are students from MU and Moberly Area Community College.

Cecil Shy, who's pursuing a doctorate in engineering at MU, comes to help the students assemble their robots each week.

"I used to take stuff apart when I was younger," Shy said. "This kind of stuff wasn't out yet when I was a kid. And if it was, I didnt know about it."

Shy worked with Nshimiyimana and Francoise while they were building their robot, helping them decipher the pictures in the instruction manual while encouraging the students to put the machine together themselves.

"Im living through them," Shy said.

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