It was down to the wire for Team Smash Brothers and Lightning Kill. Their robots had survived shoves and claws to emerge as finalists over 22 others in a Pomona competition last week. Now, the championship was at stake.
The teams of fifth- and sixth-graders shook hands. Then, action!
The bots, assembled with Lego parts and propelled by a computer chip the students had programmed, wheeled forward on a tabletop ring. They whirred and spun. Lightning Kill landed the first blow, knocking Smash Brothers on its side. Smash pushed back. Then Lightning Kill spun around and propelled itself out of the ring.
Victory for Smash Brothers! The crowd roared. The winning boys jumped up, eyes wide, mouths agape, fists pumping in the air.
Can math be this much fun?
Christian Avila, the 10-year-old son of Mexican immigrant restaurant workers, never would have thought so. Math, he said, "was a little bit boring" with work sheets of division and multiplication.
Until last year, that is, when Cal Poly Pomona educators brought the robot program to his school, Montvue Elementary in Pomona, in an effort to excite kids about math by making it less abstract and more connected to real-life problem-solving -- such as how to program robots to knock one another out of the ring.
"Now we've found something we really like: robots," said his grinning teammate and programming maestro, Juan Perez, an 11-year-old Mexico native whose father works in construction and whose mother is a school aide.
Sparking interest in math and science among students such as Christian and Juan is, experts say, essential to reclaiming the nation's slipping competitive edge. In the globalized economy, the only way to compete against countries with lower labor costs is with higher-skilled and trained workers, they say.
The issue is particularly acute in California, where retiring baby boomers -- the most educated workforce in U.S. history -- are set to vacate 3 million jobs in the next decade. Yet a significant portion of the replacement workers are likely to come from families like those at Montvue: immigrants and their children, who tend to be less prepared.
At Montvue, 89% of students are Latino, 61.8% are English language learners, and 89.7% qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. Two-thirds do not meet proficiency standards in math, and three-fourths are not proficient in English and language arts, state data show.
