DeForest Times-Tribune: The technological advancements that can be found in today’s classrooms were on full display last week for the DeForest Area School Board.
That’s because students from DeForest Area Middle School appeared before the board—with a robot they themselves programmed and named Dash—to show off the roughly 24 hours of work invested to take part in a global competition sponsored by the company Wonder Workshop.
“I call it a celebration because my students have spent many hours planning, preparing, programming for this competition,” said fifth grade science teacher Jeff Stern. “And I’m proud to say even though we weren’t a finalist, we were an honorable mention for having completed the project.”
Students told the school board how they met before school began each morning for nearly two months preparing for the competition, which had a theme this year of programming Dash to serve as a hypothetical animal protector.
“Each mission was saving animals or pushing something away from the animals,” explained one student. “One [task] was pushing cups, which represented fire, away from the animals to save them.”
More than 5,700 student teams took part in the Wonder Workshop competition from locales across the globes, all using the same robot.