Alpine’s John McQueen Middle School, under the direction of Engineering Class teacher Diana Thompkins, took first place recently in this year’s Lego League Competition. This is a competition held to inspire students to build robotic structures made from Legos. Ten students called Team Space Legends from 6th, 7th and 8th grades competed to win first place in the Robot Mechanical Design element of the Lego competition.
The simple brick-building Lego has gone technical. No longer are they the brightly colored snap and click brick toy. They are far more complex allowing innovative and challenging robotic design. Users can now explore technical functions of interconnecting light and touch sensors, and gyroscope capabilities. These highly technical building blocks allow each student to not only engage in real-world technical scenarios but to be part of a team.
This is not an overnight effort but is time sensitive under a time constraint set by Lego.
The competition theme and map was announced in August by Lego with qualifying competition held the beginning of November. Competing against the top 54 teams across Southern California, JMMS Team Space Legends is the only team in East County to advance to the Lego Competition finals.
Team Space Legends had only one month to prepare for the regionals.
Competing for points on the Lego map, the team won their qualifying round at 170 points. Polishing and adding elements to their routine they went to the finals aiming for a total of 228 points, and won.
Each team is challenged three times in three elements of competition. The first challenge is to design and program their robotics. This is the mechanical robotics portion of the competition where Team Space Legends won first place. The second challenge element was to improve or resolve a real problem astronauts might encounter.
“But most importantly,” Chris Loari, team volunteer involved in manufacturing design for his own company, said “the third element of competition being judged is team work.” The third element of competition is where core values are developed with sharing and gracious considerations used by team members consistently requiring sophisticated engagement by team members.
Team Space Legends represent the best of 200 Southern California middle schools. They brought home not just a win but an accomplishment the whole Alpine community can be proud off. They have two more competitions coming up this spring in 2019. The San Diego Aero and Space Museum will sponsor the “Fly Your Ride” competition where teams will design a flying car.
Also this spring will be the Junior Solar Sprint where students design a shoebox sized solar powered car that will compete in a sprint car race.