12/12/2018 – Covenant’s Logic School Lego Robotics Team turned in an outstanding performance at the “Raiders Rumble” FIRST Lego League Robotics Tournament this past Saturday at Melrose Middle School. In a field of 26 teams from all over Eastern Massachusetts, the Cougars walked away with the top prize for Research. This highly competitive award is a testament to the teams hard work over the past 3 months on the Innovative Research Project portion of the competition.

One of only nine awards given at the conclusion of the tournament, the Research Award “…recognizes a team that utilizes diverse resources to formulate an in-depth and comprehensive understanding of the problem they have identified.” The Cougars were asked to identify and solve a human problem that may be encountered during future long term space travel missions.

The Problem they identified was that Astronauts on long term space missions miss the familiar sights and smells at home. And while NASA allows astronauts to video-conference with their families, they do not allow the introduction of any smells to the space craft because there is no way to “air it out”. Smells can become overpowering and toxic in air sealed spaces.

The team’s solution, called their Big Idea, is a smell stimulator which works paired with a virtual reality headset and offers smells that were familiar to astronauts on Earth. The smell stimulator, which they named the Smell-O-Tronic 9000, extracts different combinations of chemicals and combines them to get a large range of smells for the astronauts; BBQ, pine, grass, ocean, and many more. The smell stimulator is designed to cover the nose only with a vacuum seal, to keep it airtight and the smells contained. The two tanks are made of carbon fiber and worn on the back. At the end of the simulation the gases that were released into the nasal chamber are sucked back out into the waste tank, preventing any unwanted smells from being introduced to the space craft living quarters.

After being identified as a Top Ten Project Team, the Cougars were invited to present their project on stage in front of the hundreds of people in attendance at the tournament.

The team also experienced great success in the completely autonomous Robot Game. The team received high praise from the judges for their sturdy and reliable robot design and for the intricate gearing system that controlled the arm extension. The team has a tradition of naming it’s robot after a favorite teacher each year, and this year it was “The Joseph” after their Latin Teacher, Ms. Joseph. They paid homage to Ms. Joseph in a humorous way by placing a lego pony-tail hair piece on the top of their robot. The judges, and many others, thought this was both touching and hilarious.

Congrats to eighth graders Danni Lynn, AJ Hofeldt, Ezra Kline, and seventh graders Willem Hofeldt, Ian Pang and Dylan Curtis for representing CCA so excellently at the tournament and for bringing home this prestigious award!