Health & Fitness
UCS students earn state Lego Robotics title
Combined Malow and Crissman team will represent Michigan at World Festival Tournament in April
Crissman Elementary & Malow Junior High have built the State Lego Robotics champions!
The eight-member "Crazy Pizza People" team earned the Grand Champion Award at the state's Lego Robotics tournament Dec. 1 in White Lake Township. A total of 163 other teams competed in regional events leading up to the state tournament in which the 48 top teams participated.
The top honor means the students will compete against 100 of the best international teams at the World Festival Tournament this April in St. Louis.
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Team members include Crissman students Austin Motloch, Carter O'Donnell, Corey Reynolds, Katie Roy, Cheyenne Smith, and Nicholas Tobin, and Malow students Giovanni Pansera and Alex Roy. The team is coached by Pascal and Amy Roy.
The Grand Champion Award is the top award at the state tournament and is earned by the team that does the best overall in all 3 categories judged: project including research, solution and presentation; team work and gracious professionalism; and robot including mechanical design, programming, strategy, and performance.
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The team also earned the top award at the UCS Thunderquest, a regional competition held at Henry Ford II High School in November.
FIRST Lego League (usfirst.org) introduces younger students (ages 9-14) to real-world engineering challenges by building LEGO-based robots to complete tasks on a thematic playing surface. FLL teams annually compete under a theme, with this year’s challenge being "Senior Solutions."
In the 2012 challenge, more than 200,000 students from over 55 countries are studying how to improve the quality of life for seniors by learning about the obstacles some people face as they get older.
The tournament features several competition categories, including a robot challenge where students create an autonomous robotic vehicle that completes specified tasks on a 4X8 table. Students also compete in teamwork challenges and a project presentation that describes their solution for issues identified in the Senior Solutions theme.
