On February 24-25, Moldovan public libraries Robo Clubs joined the FIRST LEGO League national robotics contest to challenge their programming skills and address drinking water resource issues through technical innovation.

Library robotics teams from Causeni, Rezina, Drujba and Voinova joined the competition among other 50 school teams, and demonstrated impressive programming and team-building skills in the elaboration of a community project focused on solving water resources issues in local communities, and the robotics missions, which required building, testing, and programming an autonomous robot to solve a set of tasks.

Considering their relatively short experience in building and programming robots, the 36 library robotics representatives exhibited impressive STEM-based approaches and positioned themselves among the first half contestants who achieved best rankings.

The Causeni ‘SkyNet’ library Robo Club exceeded all expectations receiving 3rd place in the national competition and the FIRST Lego League Cup in the “Strategy and Innovation” category. This award is a valuable addition to the Robo Club’s previous year ‘best-spirited team’ award at FIRST LEGO League Moldova, the “Robot Mechanics” Lego Cup and 2nd place in the “Robots in mission” category at FIRST LEGO League Estonia, and the Library Robo League trophy.

“We are proud to expand our roboclub awards collection with another FIRST LEGO League cup,” joyfully remarked Liuba Osipov, director of Causeni Raion Public Library. “We are happy that our library serves as the foundation in which youth in our community can build their future careers as engineers and programmers.”

The preparation for this contest required an implicit cooperation from both local authorities and the communities, who supported the library robotics teams’ participation in the contest and helped to pay the participation fee of 2000 MDL (the equivalent of 120 USD) each. Thus, Rezina, Causeni and Drujba library teams paid the fee with funds provided by local authorities, while the Voinova robotics team used resources gained from a successful crowdfunding campaign, which also helped them purchase several PC Tablets.

“We really wanted to participate in this contest and asked our parents to help us pay the fee. Although they agreed to contribute, the mayor insisted he would pay the fee, as this was in the best interest of our small village,” highlighted Nicolae Cebotaru, member of the Drujba Library robotics team. “This year we learned about drinking water issues that our locality faces and explored ways to fix them using programming and providing ‘outside the box’ solutions.”

The Rezina libray Robo Club has also received extensive support from their both public authorities and local business representatives. While the local authorities covered the participation fee, a local business supported and cheered for the ‘Just Do IT’ robo club, investing 720 USD to help them make their own T-shirts and cover other expenses.

Novateca is proud to support the library Robo Clubs’ dedication to fixing real world issues through innovative STEM-approaches, and is inspired to witness how they developed team spirit, fueling cooperation between communities, businesses and public authorities.