Last month, Catastrophic and Danger Kitty, two teams from Hood River New School, participated in the regional qualifiers of the FIRST Lego League robotics competition for middle school students. Both teams advanced to the state championships, with team Catastrophic taking home the Champions Award.
This year, the theme was Cargo Connect, which asked teams to identify and solve problems related to shipping across land, air, and sea. Catastrophic chose to investigate how to make shipping packaging more sustainable, experimenting with the potential of mycelium packaging. One of their coaches, Justin Ulland, said, “Team Catastrophic continued the momentum from last year with three returning and two new members. Don’t let the name fool you, this is a team that has fun in a getting-things-done sort of way. They brought home the Champions Award for outstanding performance in all aspects of the Qualifier event and are excited about the chance to represent Hood River at state competition.”
Beckett Eaton, Nyah Bursett, Judah Tsypin, Harrison Kunkler, Alex Ulland, Green Sutton and Sawyer Smith of Team Danger Kitty with their robot.
Contributed photo
Team Danger Kitty chose to look into ways of transporting freight in underground tunnels using electricity. Their coach, Lev Tsypin, said, “This group of largely first time robotic engineers quickly learned what it takes to design and program a robot, each bringing their unique contributions as they grew as a team. The way their project came together at the end was near magic.”
The FIRST Lego League offers their engineering and robotics challenges to any school or community teams who are interested. The program gives kids who are drawn to science, technology, engineering and math a place to shine and learn and practice the skills needed to make meaningful impacts and progress toward solving big world challenges.
“They have done a great job adapting their program to the challenges of an online environment, and New School students have been enthusiastically working toward the virtual competition since September,” said a press release.
“I like FLL because it’s different from other activities,” said student competitor Gillian Reed. “It’s you that gets to do it — no one tells you what to do. It’s nice to see what you can accomplish, and I learned a lot about robots and programming.”
The teams will compete against students from across Oregon.
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