WINONA LAKE – The team from Edgewood Middle School took first place overall in the qualifying competition for the FIRST Lego® League tournament Sunday at Grace College.
It was the first time Grace hosted the tournament.
“I’m pretty excited,” said Edgewood eighth-grader and “The Granny Busters” team member Hunter Haines. “Our mistakes led us to victory right now. We had the wrong placements. We didn’t get everything where it needed to be, and they ended up there.”
“I think it was teamwork that led us to our victory because we could rely on everyone,” Jarod Barber, EMS eighth-grader, said. “Basically, if we didn’t trust this whole team, we wouldn’t be anywhere.”
“It was really fun because it was working as a team, not as individuals. It feels like all our hard work paid off,” agreed eighth-grader Ethan Hoff.
Kris Farwell, tournament director at Grace College and assistant mathematics professor, said 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, he said.
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,” Farwell said.
The theme for this year’s competition is “Senior Solutions,” Farwell said. 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.
Sunday’s qualifying tournament featured 22 teams in grades four through eight. Eighteen of the teams were from Warsaw Community Schools, one was from Whitko Middle School, one from Wawasee Schools in Syracuse, one from South Bend and one from Monon, Farwell said.
The top five teams from each qualifying competition from around Indiana move on to state competition, which is scheduled for Dec. 8 from noon to 4 p.m. at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne. Farwell said there are about 10 or 12 qualifying tournaments in Indiana, so there should be 52 teams at the state contest.
Along with “The Granny Busters,” going to state will be “Geriatric Experimental Robots” from Edgewood, who placed second; “Robotic Cats” from Whitko Middle School; “TEC” from Washington STEM Academy; and “Lego Legends,” also from Washington.
“It’s very fierce in that it’s very tough, but we can make it through,” Brooklyn Fitzgerald, Washington STEM Academy fourth-grader, said after her team’s first round of competition.
Her teammate, fourth-grader Kensie Ryman, said, “We’ve learned that if you work together as a team, you can accomplish anything. Our robot’s been in-between. It’s been doing well, but it had some challenges we need to fix.”
The girls’ teacher, Tad Nieter, said of the tournament, “It’s been very unique. It’s been challenging to get the kids to learn the 21st century skills of project-based learning but overall they’ve been fantastic. I couldn’t ask for a better group. They’ve been doing really well today. Their presentation went well. They answered questions I don’t know I could have answered. They’ve done a good job. I couldn’t be more proud of them.”
Regarding the competition, Whitko Middle School eighth-grader Brandon Egolf said, “I think it’s very hectic. It’s organized in its own way. I think it’s good in some ways, lacking in others. Overall, it’s fun and it’s teaching us a lot.”
The keys to being successful, Whitko’s Zarek Courtney said, are, “you need to get along, and get straight to it and hit as hard as possible.”
Wawasee Middle School seventh-grader Zach Avery said, “It’s fun. It’s exciting, because you get to mess around with Legos®.”
“We did pretty good,” Wawasee seventh-grader Shawn Hattery said. “We all used teamwork. I would improve our missions probably. We need to get more missions down and get more points.”
“Today was spectacular,” said Washington STEM Academy Principal Tom Ray. “(We) saw a lot of sportsmanship and encouragement for team members and cooperation. It was a great activity sponsored by Grace where parents and the community could come and observe and participate in close up. This is edge-of-the-seat competition. Just watching teams cheering and clapping for other teams for just the difficulty of some of the missions just gives you chills.”
Washington sixth-grade teacher Ryan Spiess said, “I think we did exceptionally well for the pressure they were under during the end of the week.”
Thursday and Friday, he said, the students commented on the pressure they were under to get it all done for Sunday. But everything turned out fine, he said.
“I think they gained a lot of experience with this first year of Lego® League,” Spiess said. It helped them see they need to buckle down and focus on the future and what’s important, he said.
For a YouTube video of the competition created by Ray, visit www.youtube.com/watch?v=scSHi9dSZuU Farwell noted the event was short about $5,000 and Grace could use help in order to run the event next year.
His contact information is farwelk@grace.edu; telephone 574-372-5100, Ext. 6303; or fax 574-372-5124.
