Amid the bustle of people coming and going from UF Health Shands Children’s Hospital’s atrium Thursday, child patients chased and danced around toy robots fashioned from Lego kits and small motors.
The children were charged with selecting their favorite among three teams of robots. Their votes were cast in plastic buckets with Lego bricks matching the colors of the teams’ tables as part of a UF College of Engineering student competition.
UF mechanical engineering professor Dan Dickrell said the teams were composed of freshmen taking an introductory engineering design and programming course.
He said as their final project in the course, students were broken into teams and tasked with designing an interactive robot that incorporated some form of art and mimicked life. Only three of 30 designs were chosen to compete at Thursday’s second annual competition after they were whittled down by an expert panel of judges: two 6-year-olds.
“We wanted the students to kind of meet the end user of the products they’ll be making,” Dickrell said.
Among those deemed worthy were Dr. Hoot, a robot resembling an owl that spins its head when it hears loud noises, and Cheeta, a robot built to mirror its namesake with an attached hand crank that moves its legs.
Opposing these two teams was a conglomerate of robots from the yellow team: Rouge, a ladybug that was grounded due to technical difficulties; Beau, a snail that slithered along while peering out of its shell with two googly eyes; and the team’s flagship robot, Sparkle, a butterfly that flapped glitter-covered wings as it wandered carelessly across the atrium floor.
Nine-year-old patient Anna Rose said Sparkle was her favorite.
“I like it because it’s beautiful,” she said through her breathing mask, which was decorated with Disney characters.
But 5-year-old Valerie Miranda, who came with her mother to the hospital to visit her brother, said she liked all of the robots.
“The coolest one is the tiger one,” she said, pointing to Cheeta.
Shele Green, unit assistant at pediatric intensive care, said events like the competition are important for the children.
“Things like this that bring the normal back into our patients’ lives are wonderful,” Green said.
She said Sparkle “rocked” the competition.
Calm fell over the atrium as each child cast his or her Lego vote and left with parents and caretakers, taking their laughter and heavy footsteps with them.
The red, yellow and blue Legos were tallied.
In a landslide victory, the yellow team’s Sparkle — and its compatriots Beau and Rouge — won the title of the children’s favorite robot.
Yellow team programmer Nick Guarcello, an 18-year-old UF mechanical engineering freshman, said the competition was stiff, but he felt his team’s designs were better than the other teams.’
“When we built the robots, I thought, ‘This came out of pieces, and now the kids are playing with it and enjoying it,’” Guarcello said.
