Jay team earns state’s LEGO League competition championship

AUGUSTA – A pair of Franklin County teams finished first and second at the LEGO League Championship Saturday, an event which featured schools across the state.

One of Jay Middle School’s three teams, Six Chics and a Dude, took first place in the Champions Award Category, which evaluates participating teams both on the performance of their robot and their project presentation. Taking second place in the general category was Two Bee Determined, from Cascade Brook School in Farmington.

This was the 10th annual championship for the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) LEGO League, an international competition utilizing courses and robots built out of kits offered by Lego Group. The company makes basic Legos, which you may recall as small bricks that could snap together to form walls, buildings and cities, as well as Lego NXT robot kits. These kits are utilized by the league’s 5,000 teams to accomplish a number of tasks along an obstacle course.

In addition to being rated on a variety of activities on the robot course, teams also must make a presentation before three judges on a project they’ve researched and developed. This year’s theme was “smart move,” with projects focusing on improving transportation-related problems or issues.

Six Chics and a Dude created a film and presentation on Maine’s groundbreaking distracted driver law (the video can be seen here). They took first prize in the Table Top Performance Awards, actually completing the different missions on the LEGO League-regulation course. These missions include tests of power, speed, precision and finesse. Some of the missions included transporting a load of little Lego people, moving another small vehicle, navigating the course, including a bridge, and lifting a series of small hoops while threading through rows of walls.

This is the fifth year Jay teams have competed in the event, with another team winning the statewide competition in 2007. Jay’s coach is teacher Rob Taylor, who leads the Gifted and Talented Program at JMS.

Two Bee Determined, coached by Jan Roberts, took second place overall, buoyed by strong performances in several categories. The seven students in the team are Ben Andrews, Grace Andrews, Mitch Guillaume, Thomas Marshall, Nicole Pires, Dylan Roberts and Zeke Robinson. The CBS team chose to focus their presentation on using a hive of bees as a model for transportation systems and commerce.

They finished second in the Robot Design Category. While a standard kit is used by all 50 teams in Maine, as well as the thousands across the country, it is up to each team how they build the robot. This varies from deciding on the number of wheels to what sort of navigation system the robot uses.

Another Jay team, the Autobots, took fourth place in the Project Presentation Category, choosing to focus on the transportation of goods to and from the local Verso Paper Company facility. The Autobots’ robot also did well in the preliminary rounds, receiving the third highest score registered at the event.

The Kit Kats, the third team from Jay, presented a system of parachutes and airbags for crashing helicopters. The system they designed was based in part on the landing systems used by the deployment systems for the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity.

Six Chics and a Dude, consisting of Alexa Perkins, Sydney Bishop, Alyssa Timberlake, Kendra Peart, Erik Taylor, Emily Taylor and Brittany Carrier, will have the opportunity to potentially travel to Atlanta in April, to represent the state of Maine at the LEGO League World Festival.

The LEGO League championship event is sponsored by Maine Robotics, the Oak Grove School Foundation, Cyr Bus Lines, Freight liner of Maine, and the Dead River Company.