Students and staff from Dartmouth Middle School showed off the school’s efforts to expand its STEM offerings at the June 5 School Committee meeting.

The school's newest initiative is the Lego Mindstorm robotics program. This after-school program, run by teachers Jamie Guile and Adam Desjardins, uses specially designed Lego kits to create robots. Students compete in the FIRST Lego League program. As it was the first year for the middle school, their debut in a December competition was a bit tricky.

“We could’ve done better [in the competition], but being a rookie team I think we did okay," Gulie said.

Dartmouth Middle student Jack Kertscher showed committee members the robot he helped build, and explained how competitions work.

“We had to program our robots to do all sorts of tasks. The harder the task the more points you are given,” Kertscher explained, adding that this year’s challenges were animal-themed, like programming a robot to retrieve “honey” from a “hive.”

As part of the competition, students also created a smartphone app tied to the animal theme. Inspired by a string of wild turkey sightings around town, students created an app that lets its users take a photo and share the location of wild animals, including turkeys, foxes, and other wildlife.

Pam Glass runs the school’s traditional robotics program. Her students create robots suitable for industrial purposes such as completing a manufacturing process. She uses a dated but resourceful robotics platform that requires the use of a relic of computing’s past to program the robots.

“It’s actually a DOS-based program,” Glass said. “They have to use the old DeMello computers, which are 25 years old. The robots tend to have a mind of their own.”

This year, her students created a robot capable of sharpening pencils. Since the robot was not working properly due to an issue with a servo motor, she brought a creation her Project Invention engineering and design students made last year, a working hovercraft.