Morrow, Oh. - In their first year doing Lego Robotics, four Little Miami Intermediate School students claimed the Robot Design Award at the Springboro regional tournament Nov. 15, and fared well enough to qualify for the upcoming district championships.
Sixth grader Rhett Bendure and fifth graders Kyle Evers Smith, Aaron Horak and Jaxon Craig make up Team MPI (Masters of Programming Insanity). At the Springboro event, competing against 11 other teams in the FIRST Lego League, they came in second in the Robotics Performance portion of the competition. Their design award was one of four major awards given out.
To compete in the regional event in Springboro, Team MPI had to complete a research project and a team build, and also program a EV3 Lego Mindstorms robot. The robot had to autonomously complete a number of tasks on a competition table in a 2.5-minute robot round. During the tournament, the team met with three different judge panels: 1) judges who evaluated their robot design, programming, and problem-solving strategies; 2) judges who looked at their research project, solution and outreach; and 3) judges who evaluated how well the group functioned as a team, and how well they brought the FLL core values to their local community. Judges used a national set of rubrics to help them determine which teams received awards.
In the Robot Design, Research Project, and Core Values, Team MPI received scores of Accomplished/Exemplary with specific strengths called out in Teamwork, Programming, Strategy & Innovation, and Research. In selecting Team MPI as the recipient of the Robot Design award, judges looked for a team whose strategies for solving missions and whose process for understanding and documenting the design process stand out. Judges also evaluated the robot¹s mechanical design, degree of innovation and programming effectiveness to assess overall design quality.
Team MPI¹s robot, named ³JARK,² was a compact, simplistic design built small to maneuver around a very tightly packed robot board, with the tea relying on NASCAR-type rapid Base Attachment changes to accomplish their targeted missions. This strategy allowed the robot to perform flawlessly in the third round of the competition and to place second overall in total points.
The district championships are at iSPACE in Cincinnati on Jan. 10.
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