Delco Technobots win Lego robot state championship
The Delco Technobots are state champions.
A group of Delaware County fourth-to-eighth graders recently won the First Lego League Pennsylvania State Championship held in Hershey.
The Technobot team consists of siblings Diya and Adi Iyer of Media, Ari Danovitch of Swarthmore, Arjun Kumar of Garnet Valley as well as coaches Sriram Balasubramanian and Pavan Kumar.
In this year’s FLL Challenge season over 350 teams participated, with the winners narrowed down during regional qualifying tournaments. Twenty-four teams took part in Hershey.
The Delco Technobots will now advance to the World Robotics Championships at Houston in April, the second straight year the team has advanced to that level.
According to the organization’s website, the program was founded in 1998 and introduces science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) to children through fun, exciting hands-on learning. Participants gain real-world problemsolving experience through a guided, global robotics program, helping today’s students and teachers build a better future together.
As part of the competition, the teams were asked “How would your team use technology and art to share their passion?”
The Technobots embraced bees and beekeeping.
The team decided to use virtual reality technology and
animation to share their passion about bees and beekeeping, said lead coach Balasubramanian.
They created several VR videos with a local beekeeping expert, including an animation video on the life of bees, a book on bees and beekeeping and a website to share all this information.
These were the four categories that the teams were scored on: robot game, robot design, core values and innovation project. Technobots won the Robot Performance Award and the Champions Award.
Each year in August there are 15 new missions announced for teams to conquer. Teams then build and program the Lego robots.
During the competition, robots had 2½ minutes to go through as many of the challenges as possible. The team wore bee gear to get into the spirit of their presentation: “Please be a Honey and Save the Bees.”
The students agreed winning was fun but the best part was building robots and programming them to complete missions.