Student teams qualify for national robotics competition

20 students from grades 7, 9 and 10 made the Academy proud at the Hyderabad FIRST Lego League, a local chapter of an international robotics competition for elementary and middle school students, held across 98 countries.

Academy students formed two teams, Team Queso and Team Builderhood, both of whom qualified for the nationals which will be held in Bangalore in February 2019. Team Builderhood also won the Best Robot Award for their robot design and for the presentation of the robot design executive summary. There were 14 teams participating, out of which four made it through to the nationals. 

FIRST Lego League brings students together in teams to research a real world problem such as food safety, recycling, energy, etc., and are challenged to develop a solution. They also must design, build, and program a robot using LEGO MINDSTORMS® technology, then compete on a table-top playing field. The competition encourages kids to think like scientists and engineers.

Academy students, who bagged a best project award at the competition last year, have been collaborating with each other and working on their missions for more than two months while honing their problem solving skills and coming up with creative solutions for the challenges they could potentially face during the event. Throughout their experience, teams were supposed to operate under the FIRST signature set of core values, celebrating discovery, teamwork, and gracious professionalism. This year over 40,000 teams consisting of half a million students participated in FLL challenges across the world. 

FIRST Lego League is unique in that it doesn’t only assess what teams have done (robot game, research project) but it also emphasizes how they have been able to do it as a group. Teams have to uphold the importance of discovery over simply winning. This year the challenge was designed around a space theme, and was called ‘into orbit.’ Students were supposed to identify a physical or social problem faced by humans during long duration space exploration and design a way to solve the problem. During this phase the students talked to experts and incorporated their feedback to make their projects better.  

 “This was a great learning experience, as I worked with grade 10 students,” commented Adam Osho, a grade 7 FLL participant. “It felt like a family of fun learners!” Venkat, who is a star builder for the team, has already represented his previous school at the nationals and understands the challenge: “We have to up our game, it is the nationals, after all!’’ The teams will be competing with FLL teams from all over the country and it is bound to be intense, fun and very informative. “The biggest learning for me was trying to balance academics, personal projects and also preparing for the regionals. We did it as a team!” quipped Aman Gangani. “But we need to make sure that we are efficient and extremely organised as we prepare for Bangalore.”

AKA Hyderabad wishes the teams all the very best for the upcoming competition!

Contributed by Afeera Maryam, I&S faculty and FLL coach