‘Underdog’ robotics team eyes national title
Glastonbury students headed to Texas for inventing competition
Ateam of young Glastonbury students will soon be heading to Texas to represent Connecticut in a national inventing competition. The Lego robotics team of fifth and eighth graders created an AI-powered platform to take home the town’s first-ever state championship. Out of approximately 150 teams across the state and hundreds of competitors, the winning team, the Glastonbury Goats, took home the first-place trophy in December after creating a platform that helps turn ordinary trash into pieces of art. Coaches Vasudha Srikanth and Supriya Bendre led the relatively new team to victory at the state championship held at Glastonbury High School.
“One of the most memorable moments of my life when I heard my team’s name, the Glastonbury Goats, called at the state competition. It was surreal and all of us were thrilled that all our hard work and perseverance had paid off,” Varun Srikanth, an eighth-grader at Smith Middle School, said. “It was a proud moment when we were recognized at our schools and my teachers and friends congratulated us. I am super excited to compete and meet the other winning teams at the World Championship.”
The competition is part of the international First Lego League challenge, a partnership between the robotics organization FIRST and the LEGO Group, that engages elementary and middle school-aged students 9 to 14 years old. The challenge is broken into two parts. Students must work together on a real-world challenge to conduct research and problem solve by creating an innovation project around a theme. The robotics part of the competition involves designing and programming Lego Education robots to complete several tasks.
This year’s theme for the challenge was integrating art and technology to have a positive impact on the world.
The team is composed of eighth-graders from Smith Middle School, including Varun Srikanth, Ashton Stiner, Aarna Rao and Aadhav Durai, and fifth-graders Shaurya Bidkar, Maya Stiner, Aadya Rao and Shreya Srikanth. Maya attends Gideon Welles School while the others are students at Hebron Avenue School.
“We are so proud of our team, it was quite a journey to get here,” Srikanth said. “We were considered an underdog team, since we are rookie coaches and we started later in the year. Other towns like Farmington and Avon have a lot bigger teams and have been competing longer. Glastonbury just started competing in the FLL challenge about five years ago.”
Teams usually start out in August and are given several months to prepare for finals in the fall. However, the Glastonbury Goats formed later in September, because they originally didn’t have enough players. Despite the early challenges, the team came together rather quickly, according to Srikanth. Each team member brought a different skill including coding, robot building, attachment design, creativity, website development, planning and marketing.
“These strengths enabled the team to work on multiple aspects of the project in parallel to achieve success in the Regionals and States competition,” Srikanth said.
At the beginning of the competition season, FIRST sends a set of official competition materials to each team, consisting of a challenge mat, LEGO electronic and mechanical components for the robot, and instructions for building the items for the mat. The teams also receive a list of tasks or missions to complete before teams finally present their robot and innovation idea in front of judges, who score on categories including innovation, design, and core values.
“We actually did e-build our robot a few times because it didn’t quite work for the number of missions we wanted to do,” Srikanth said. “The coding for the robot was all done first with the build of the robot itself. We then had our innovation project using AI to provide ideas and showcase the impact created in the environment by looking into all of the materials you have around the house and the cool art pieces you can create from them.”
The team created Trash2Treasure, an AI-powered platform to help create art out of waste. Users chat with an AI bot to learn about things often thrown away and how they may be harmful to the environment. Then users can get easy instructions to create something beautiful out of the trash.
The Glastonbury Goats now have a chance to compete for the national title in the four-day FIRST Championship in Houston in April. Last year, around 200 teams participated from around the world with over 50,000 people attending.
“It’s a pretty big event,” Bendre said. “There were presentations last year from 59 countries. So to be able to represent Connecticut is huge. We’ve never had Glastonbury represented in the FFL challenge championship. The previous year was Shelton and before that was Cheshire. Glastonbury has a pretty big STEM program, yet this is the town’s first state championship. Just to go to regionals and then compete at state finals was big enough. Going to the world championship is just the cherry on top.”