Team Voltage hosts annual competition

Team Voltage, a South Brevard robotics team with many students from West Shore and Melbourne High School recently hosted a robotics competition, featuring 16 teams with kids from ages nine to 14.

Participating teams are part of the First Lego League, which spans 98 countries and has more than 40,000 teams in its membership, according the First Lego League website.

Each competition consists of two parts: problem solving and the robot game.

During the problem-solving round, each team is tasked with an issue humans encounter when going to space. Some teams prepare working models while others develop ideas. They are evaluated on how they work together to solve the problem, present their solution to the problem and the build and function of their robot.

During the robot game, teams build a robot based on a playing field mapped out to them and have their robot perform several tasks autonomously.

The Robotic Alliance won the Champion’s Award, which is an award given for a combination of excellence in both the problem solving and robot game.

Five other awards were given out for core values, robot design, a well thought out solution, judge recognition and robot performance.

Freshman Daniel Zschau said the competition played out the way he expected and that the competition was a good time with many great presentations.

Katie, the head referee of the competition was further impressed.

“The competition went even better than I expected it to go,” she said. “The tables ran on time or early all day and none of the pieces went missing from the field all day.

She said the only kink was the time it took judges to decide near the end of the day.

“There were a lot of excellent presentation, with a chunk of great ideas with innovative solutions,” she said.

By Dylan Maxik