Granny Busters, a team from Edgewood Middle School, won second place in robot design at the FIRST Lego League Indiana Championship Tournament Saturday at IPFW. “I was pretty excited about our programming and it was pretty efficient,” eighth-grader Beau Eckel said this morning. “We had one of the best robots with our programming.” Jarod Barber said they were able to take second place because “it was the door hinge-thing that really got us. It could do anything.” At state contest, Katie Newland said some of the other robots were really big and intimidating. However, she said, “Ours put up a good fight.” If he could do it again, Ethan Hoff said he probably wouldn’t “freak out” when they had to place the robot on the competition board. The group agreed teamwork was the overall key to their success. Dayton Groninger said, “I learned that teamwork is a big priority. We couldn’t have done it without working together.” “I never thought I’d be doing something with robots, especially in the eighth grade,” said Emily May. “The team was formed from a group of misfits, and we end up winning here.” “I learned that I need to help my teammates and work together. Take ideas from everyone and put them together,” said Hunter Haines. Coach Kristen Swangin said, “The Granny Busters overcome more problems and worked better together than my other seven teams, and that’s why they were more successful.” The eighth-grade team was one of five teams that advanced to state from the Grace College qualifying tournament Nov. 18. The other teams were the Geriatric Experimental Robots from Edgewood; Lego Legends and TEC from Washington STEM Academy; and Robotic Cats from Whitko Middle School. Ben Barkey, Washington STEM coach, said more than 70 Warsaw students competed in Saturday’s tournament. There are three main aspects to the competition: the robot game, the presentation to the judges and a core values presentation. For the robot game, teams have to build autonomous robots that complete 14 missions. The teams pick what missions they can do in order to get the most points possible. Robots are not remote-controlled but programmed by students. Each team participates in three rounds, and is randomly paired with another team on the contest board. The total points at the end is the maximum amount of points of the three rounds. The theme for this year’s competition was “Senior Solutions.” Teams had to get a mentor 60 years old or older. The mentor then shared their problems with students, and the teams had to create solutions for one of those problems. Teams then had to give presentations to the judges on those solutions.
