Shorewood robotics team receives ‘Rising Star Award’ from First Lego League

The robotics team at Trinity Christian School in Shorewood received the Rising Star Award from First Lego League on Jan. 19, according to a news release from Trinity Christian.

Team M & M recipients of the “Rising Star Award” are Coach Amy McKnight, Tanner Vugteveen (third grade), Carly Payton (fourth grade), Rafey Stachura (third grade), Joey Mongelli (third grade), Christian Pilon (third grade), Aria McKnight (fourth grade), Aidan Clodfelter (fourth grade), Mya McKnight (third grade), and Nikolai Drapak (third grade), according to the release.

Head coaches of the robotics program at Trinity Christian School are Christine McBride and Terese Osacky.

“We are so very proud of all of them,” McBride said in the release. “In the beginning of the year, many of them had no idea what a robotics team was and what it meant to be on a robotics team. Only a few team members had experience coding and now every team member has learned how to program in the ‘blocky’ computer language, and some have advanced to ‘python’ and ‘javascript’ computer languages.”

First Lego League is an international robotics STEM program for ages 4 through 16. Trinity Christian School has 52 students from grades three through eight who participate in its robotics program, according to the release.

Students met once a week from August through December to prepare for the First Lego League qualifying tournament, which was held Dec. 4 at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Fourteen teams participated, according to the release.

First Lego League held a total of 20 tournaments around Illinois totaling 634 teams and more than 6,000 Illinois students, according to the release.

For the competition, the students had to build and program a LEGO robot to navigate the missions of a robot game table. This helped the students engage in problem-solving, coding and engineering, according to the release.

Teams also participate in a research project regarding identifying and solving “a relevant real-world problem” – and then present their findings and solution to a panel of judges, according to the release.

At the competition, Mason Hester (fourth grade), Zion Pickens (third grade) and Corinne Bryant (third grade) wound up reconstructing their broken robot. Isaac McCoy (seventh grade) and Joshua Vargas (seventh grade) also reconstructed their robot at the competition table, according to the release.

And, according to the release, when the judges asked the question, “What are you most proud of?” fourth-grader Olivia Colianne said, ”I am most proud of how before Robotics, all of us didn’t know each other and now, after doing this, we are friends and have fun together.”

For information, visit trinitychristian.info/athletics/robotics.cfm.