Second grader Tianna Ross built a wrecking ball Thursday. At least, a miniature version of a wrecking ball.

As she told Paul White, a third-grade teacher, about her accomplishments, White congratulated her on her achievements. He asked her where the wheels and axles would go on her wrecking ball.

“Would it be easy or hard to move a wrecking ball?” he asked.

While Tianna pondered the question, other students at Southgate Elementary School crowded around a bin, ready to dig out more Legos to build other contraptions.

Southgate is in its second year of the Lego League program, an after school activity where students learn about basic engineering concepts through playing with Legos. While first-through-fourth graders learn firsthand the science behind simple machines like pulleys, fifth graders can join a robotics team.

“We’re servicing 100 kids,” David Wolff, a fourth-grade teacher and Lego League supervisor said. “Last year, we were thinking ‘we’ll be happy if we get 30 kids.’ We got 75.”

There are three sessions for this year’s Lego League for first-through-fourth graders at Southgate, and they’re all filled up, according to Wolff. During a session, students meet three times a week after school learning about mechanics and machines like levers, pulleys, wedges and wheels. After a while, they’ll learn about the theme chosen by FIRST, the Lego League’s parent organization, which has to do with biomedical engineering.

“These kids will be working toward researching one way doctors, engineers have developed something that helps us,” Wolff said.

Afterwards, the students will be creating a moving model of the medical device, which could be as simple as a bandage or an x-ray machine. The model must show either how it works or how it’s made.

The fifth grade robotics team will be researching childhood obesity, their chosen medical topic for this year’s theme, and will try to design a robot-based solution to the problem, or at least a practical one.

The robotics team will also compete against other Lego League programs across Minnesota in December, where they will play what Wolff calls the “Robot Game.”

The Robot Game involves using a pre-assembled robot, called an NXT Robot, built using the Lego MINDSTORMS set, which allows students to build a robot and then enter in computer programs to make said robot perform actions like moving forwards and backwards. Of course, the robot can do complex actions like pick something up, which involves entering in specific commands that detail every action the robot must make, such as moving an appendage up or down, closing around an object, and returning to its original state.

At the competition later this year, Southgate’s Lego League team will attempt several tasks in the Robot Game, including pushing a model heart pump and pacemaker into a model heart, mending a broken Lego bone by getting the robot to push the bone together and then place a blue cast over the break and other tasks they will have to accomplish through computer programming and remote control.

“It’s fun to build stuff,” said Caleb Dokken, a third grader participating in this session’s Lego League.

Wolff had run another Lego League program at another school before taking a job at the Austin Public School district three years ago. Last year, he wrote a grant to the Austin Public Education Foundation to help fund a Lego League program for the school. It’s become so popular there are now Lego League teams for elementary students at Sumner and Banfield Elementary Schools, although Southgate is the only school with a robotics team thus far.

“We’re learning concepts beyond what they realize,” Wolff said.

Wolff and White are both volunteers, as are the teachers at the other elementary schools. They all care passionately about students learning about science in an unconventional way.

“It’s actually a fifth grade science, so I’m going to be ahead,” said Lauren Riskedahl, a third grader. “I feel pretty good (about that).”