The robotics team at AMIT Yud Ashdod just achieved another impressive success, winning the regional Arduino competition and advancing to the national stage. They will be joined in the nationals by eighth-grade students from AMIT Daisy Berman Yeshiva in Beersheva.
The competition, organized by the Education Ministry’s technological education administration, relates to the subject of 70 years of Israeli education. Each team learns to use an Arduino—which is an open-source platform used for building electronics projects—and then builds and programs one that relates to this year’s theme.
An Arduino consists of both a physical programmable circuit board (often referred to as a microcontroller) and a piece of software, or IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that runs on a computer, used to write and upload computer code to the physical board.
Robotest, the AMIT Yud Ashdod team consisting of 7th and 8th graders led by teacher Alejandra Pielnik, built a model comprising four robots. Each robot presents a different aspect of the presentation: a song about a specific year in Israeli history, information about that year, a significant event from that year, and a photograph from that year.
The students also connected a robot to blue and white LED lights and a controller connected to the flag causes it to wave when someone passes by it.
The Beersheva team comprises three students who join an 11th-grade electronics class once a week. Guided by their teachers Moshe Maimon and Rabbi Aharon Saada, the students built a “smart” menorah.
The digital menorah features an alarm that reminds its owner what time to light it; a thermostat to check the temperature around the menorah; and a remote-controlled lighting option.
Their teachers were especially excited by the good news that they were advancing to the national stage of the competition.
“They took the project seriously, persisted, and proved that they can succeed throughout the process and with the final product,” said Maimon.
The teams will compete in the national competition at the end of May.
