FREMONT, CA: Northern California First Lego League competition encourages children to use engineering to understand all about trash problem that we are facing, from collection, to sorting, to smart production and reuse; there is more to trash than meets the eye. Hence, the championship’s theme: TrashTrek.
Eleven teams from Fremont gathered for the Qualifying tournament on Saturday, November 21 at Niles Discovery Church, Fremont.
Students, ranging in ages from nine to 14-years-old were required to identify a trash problem and create an innovative solution, through engineering. This project was not the only portion of the challenge.
Competitors were asked to create a robot using Lego Mindstorms technology, which attempted to complete as many missions as possible in 2.5 minute matches on a themed playing field, for over 900 points. The all day tournament closed with an awards ceremony presentation.
Clad in colorful matching outfits, teams gathered in the auditorium to display their robots and compete. Cheers from the audience and “photo-snapping” parents added to the excitement. Whole day consisted of one practice round and three robot game matches. Teams were also tested for robot design, project work and core values. Epicbotz team won the ultimate award at this tournament that is the Championship award and have now advanced to District level championship.
Epicbotz Team’s head coach is Nishi Deokule and the team consists of members who are mere 12 year old. They are all 7th grade students, mostly from Challenger School, Ardenwood i.e. Akshey Deokule, Shervil Patel, Sahil Saoji, Sahith Kudaravalli. Other team members who are ex-Challenger students are Rishabh Saxena (Stratford school, Fremont) and Aryan Arora (Basis school, San Jose).
Mark Edelman, Co-founder of Playing at Learning, which runs Northern California FLL, said while handing over the Championship award to Epicbotz, “The Championship award goes to the team that achieves excellence and innovation in both robot game and the project.”
The judges said this team had excellent time management. “They showed consideration and appreciation for all their team members. This team could handle failure when the mission failed; they diagnosed it right away, even though it was the fault in the set up. This team deserves to be the champion as they stand out on all aspects of the project they implemented. Their idea was one of the best and was presented very well and they have done the required research in the field.”
India Post News Service
