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Photo by Brianne Saab

Parul Pari, freshman, and Deanna Gambino, junior, talk strategy before the competitions begin. Each team takes a distinct approach to the game that fits with their robot design.

For the first time in their history, the Lego Robotics club placed amongst the top three at today’s final competition.

The competition was against teams from Vernon Hills, Libertyville, and Zion Benton high schools at Abbott Laboratory in Green Oaks. LZHS teams “The Dork Side” and “Goblin Sharks” placed first and third respectively, with a Vernon Hills team narrowly claiming second. 

“The competition itself is a race to deliver ping pong balls to different height containers throughout an obstacle course of pits and columns that students have to maneuver around to deliver the ping pong balls,” Anna Wesolik, Lego Robotics club sponsor, said. “The goal is to get as many points as you can within a certain time frame.”

The Lego club consists of four different teams with four people on each team, totaling to 16 team members. Each of the four Lego club teams designed different robots to tackle the same challenge.

“We had done something like it before, where we had to drop balls into buckets in a line, so we took that robot and fixed the problem with it,” Jason Saab, freshman and member of “The Dork Side,” said. “It wasn’t precise enough and so we fixed it to drop only one ball at a time. Our main focus was precision, along with speed because we had to do this at a fast rate. I tried to map out the quickest routes to get through the cups, which is what we ended up using, but we did have to focus and make split second decisions because of course, not everything went as planned.”

Their strategy paid off, as they scored 9 points in the first round and 14 in the second, with a grand total of 23 points that gave them first place. The third place team, “Goblin Sharks,” scored 17 points overall, missing out on the second place spot by one point.

“Honestly, I feel great,” Saab said. “Of all the other small competitions, our team only won one, and that was when I wasn’t there. It’s pretty amazing to be there when it happened, and since it was the final competition, it was a big deal. To place first was our final hurrah.”

The team has seen great improvements in trying to achieve their goals over the semester, according to Wesolik. She said that due to buildup of student mentors in the Lego program, the teams have improved greatly.

“The student mentors certainly helped a lot,” Saab said. “They provided ideas when we were stumped, new angles to look at the challenges we had and the rules that we were given. They were helpful in the small ways too, like helping us find pieces. If we didn’t have the mentors, probably some of the things each of the teams ended up building wouldn’t have been built, because they came from advice the mentors gave us.”