A group of Valle Lindo Elementary School students traveled across the country over the weekend of April 28-30, to compete in a world championship robotics tournament in Louisville, Kentucky.
The VEX Robotics World Championship IQ Challenge welcomed more than 400 elementary school teams from around the world, with students competing in robotic skills and teamwork challenges.
The team from Valle Lindo, a group of four sixth-graders named the EagleBotz, earned an invitation to the event after competing and advancing from both local and state tournaments.
“I think we’re still in disbelief that this occurred,” said third-grade teacher Catherine Luzak, a few days before the event. Luzak oversees the program and came up with the idea to bring robotics to the school.
The program is just over a year old, so the fact that one of the school’s three teams made it to a world championship event came as a surprise to the teacher.
“We don’t even know what we’re getting into,” Luzak said. “We only went to three tournaments and then to the states and now to the world.”
The team did enough at the state championships to earn an invite to Louisville, and went into the event ranked No. 213 in the world and No. 150 in the United States.
“This is a team that the first tournament we went to, all of us were like, “Uh, what do we do?” Luzak said. “We kind of knew, but we didn’t realize a lot of stuff.”
Robotics at the elementary school level involves piecing together a plastic robot that comes from a kit, programming it and learning how to maneuver it to do tasks.
The process encourages teamwork, creativity and ingenuity, and the students are required to keep an engineer’s notebook on hand to record the robot’s successes and failures.
“This is something that they needed,” Luzak said. “Not all kids would like this or want to do this, and these kids just took it and just ran with it.”
In addition to how well the robots perform a series of challenges, teams are also graded on their attitudes.
“The judges walk around and they notice who’s naughty and who’s nice and who’s shaking hands after tournaments,” Luzak said.
The program does not come without cost, but the school received two donated robotics kits from other local schools, and applied for grants in order to get a third.
The tournaments themselves can also be costly, with registration fees going from $100 at the local level to $975 at the VEX world championship tournament.
In order to help cover the costs the school has done fundraising, received help from the student council and even gotten some unexpected contributions from students themselves.
“I had a first grader come in today and give me a Ziploc bag with $2.63 and said, this is for the robotics team,” Valle Lindo Principal Erik Latoni said.
The school estimated that the total cost of taking the team to Louisville would total around $10,000 and a GoFundMe page that was set up raised a little over $2,600.
Still, Latoni said whether or not to attend the event was never in question.
“We couldn’t say no,” he said. “We have to basically say, ‘Well, we’ll use up all of the energies that we have and what funds we can leverage and we’ll try to get them sent to the championships and not on their own dollar’.”
The program has had affects beyond just exercising young brains, according to Latoni, who relayed a story about a student who came out of his shell for the first time to talk about his experience.
“It almost brought tears to our eyes,” Latoni said. “At one of our family night presentations he stood up and told a room full of adults what robotics was about. I mean he actually spoke and this child had never spoken in front of a group of people before.”
The EagleBotz competed in robot skills challenges at the championship event, both together and in collaboration with other teams, and while they did not take first place, it helped teach a lesson that no dream is to big.
“You’re having fun in an afterschool program locally, but you know, you have world championships in your eyes,” Latoni said. “It’s possible. You can be in Valle Lindo and you can stand in front of the office and look out towards Louisville, Kentucky and say we can get there.”
