Students of all ages learn robotics, programming and communication skills at Elkhart’s E3 – South Bend Tribune

ELKHART You could say Killian Townsend is inquisitive.

"I remember when, I was like in the third or fourth grade, that I dragged this big tube TV from down the road into my room and tore it apart," the Elkhart High School freshman said.

Likewise, Weston Markham, a16-year-oldstudent at Northwood High School, said he loved playing with Legos as a kid and has enjoyed building things for as long as he can remember.

Eventually, Killian and Weston found their way to E3 Robotics Center, a nonprofit program that trains students inkindergarten through grade 12 in the STEM-related disciplines of robotics andcode writing.

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Brian Boehler, president and executive director, said that the overarching goal of E3, which isfunded through grants, corporations andprivatedonors,is simply to get students of all grade levels involved in STEM.

For kindergartners and their siblings or neighbors in elementary school, that involves doing activities with Lego blocks.

"The program starts at youngest levels with Duplo Lego and standard Lego, where kids are working at problem solving through engineering building challenges, and they are then tasked to come up with solutions in small groups," Boehler said.

The activities become more complex as the students get older.

Older elementary school kids work with Legos that include motors and sensors.

"These Legos are different than the onesyou hadgrowing up," Boehler said. "They can make their creations interact and move based on the world around them using thesesensorsand motors."

The older students like Killian and Weston work together to make robots that can perform tasks.

For example, last year, Weston's team made a robotthey programmed to drive around a field and gobble up rubber balls.

"The head part has a roller at the very front that will spin and bring balls into it," he said. "The entire head can lift and if we run the roller the other direction, it can spit the balls out."

The robotseems to move and perform each task as if by magic. But it is not magic. Instead, team members have planned every aspect of the robot's mission. Some team members wrote computer programs to instruct the robot. Other built the robot. But all had to work together.

So,while many people focus on hard skills like computer programming, the students also have to master skills like communication, working in groups and knowing how to organize tasks, Boehler said.

"You mix these things all together because some kids will know how to do different things," Weston said.

Killian agrees, noting he worked as one of the programmers for his team.

"Our main programmer did mostly autonomous stuff, which is where the robot does things on his own, and I mostly did the manual part where the drivers control it (usually with a joystick)," Killian said.

Boehler has a deep history with robotics in Elkhart and with the E3 Robotics program. He was a member of the state's first Lego League team when he was a student at Mary Feeser Elementary School.

He graduated from Memorial and then attended Ball State University, where he majored in urban planning and development.

"Unfortunately, I graduated in the middle of a recession, so not a lot of cities wanted to redesign or rebuild," Boehler said.

It was around that time that the Elkhart schools asked Boehler to help set up the system's robotics program. At that time he worked for another nonprofit STEM program in Elkhart County called the ETHOS Innovation Center. There, he helped to develop the district's STEM and robotics curriculum and soon, other schools, and homeschoolers came on board.

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In 2012, Boehler and co-director Brent Soper founded E3.

Boehler saidthere is enough interest in robotics and STEM in the area to accommodate more than one program.

"We really haven't seen a cap yet on (the number of students) that robotics is able to get," he said.

The E3 program had more than 120 students prior to the beginning of the pandemic and even managed to work with about 60 students last year. Boehler hopes to build the numbers back up this year.

Robotics programs statewide have grown as students and parents see the benefits of learning STEM skills such as programming, as well as the soft skills like communication, planning and team building that employers crave, said Chris Osborne, vice president of operations of First Indiana Robotics, which is the nonprofit that works with and oversees robotics programs in the state.

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Osborne notedthere were 900 students from 42 high schools taking part in the First Robotics Competition in 2012. That number grew to 58 teams and about 1,600 students intending to participate in 2020.

The First Tech Challenge, which is for students in grades seven through 12 and the First Lego League, which is an introductory program for elementary school students, saw similar growth, Osborne said.

Weston, meanwhile, said he believeshe has benefited from being in the program.

"If I were not in theprogram,I never would have learned the hard skills," he said, "but secondly I would have not learned all the ways to communicate and plan things."

Email South Bend Tribune reporter Howard Dukes at hdukes@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter:@DukesHoward.

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Students of all ages learn robotics, programming and communication skills at Elkhart's E3 - South Bend Tribune