Coe Elementary School's CoeBotics team has worked hard enough to win themselves the "TeamWork" award and move on to Saturday's state finals in Spanaway.
CoeBotics is the school's robotics team that has been preparing Lego robots since September to compete in last week's state competition in Bellevue. It was just one of many locations throughout Washington where teams came together.
The theme of "The Human Body" came into play as the teams arranged their robots on the board to complete as many tasks as possible in the two minutes they had to do so. The autonomous robots, after the push of a button, went and completed various tasks including fixing a broken bone, moving white and red blood cells into the "patient area," and bringing a syringe into a base where teams work on the robots.
Team founder Willem Scholten stated: "We scored 100 points, and the highest score recorded [at the Dec. 4 competition] was 190. We ranked fifth overall in robotics score." The team won the "TeamWork" award for the second year in a row, as "our team was absolutely working as one well-oiled, 20-person Coe team," he added.
Of the 10 regional qualifiers that competed this past Saturday, the top five teams of each qualifier move on to the state finals. CoeBotics was the only elementary school to make it onto state from the Bellevue qualifying region.
Team member Beck Svaren, a fifth grader at Coe, was shocked and pleased to win the TeamWork award again. Scholten said Svaren had been encouraging the team the week before that, saying, "We need to concentrate on working together."
All of the kids participated in the two presentations, on malaria and mosquito-borne illnesses. Scholten said the malaria team "proposed to construct cheap multi-purpose malaria attack nano-bots which would enter your blood stream and hunt down the malaria infection in your body. The other team proposed a UVMP (Ultra Violet Mosquito Protector) which identifies harmful mosquitoes about to attack your body and then zaps them."
To prepare for state, the team will be concentrating mostly on "the Robot Challenge." The team believes they need additional practice on setup, and refining some attachments to the robots to make them easier to get on or off and make it past their score of 100.
This coming Saturday's challenge will have 45 to 50 teams from all over the state compete, with "rules very tightly enforced," according to Scholten. The team, however, is ready for the challenge and strict rules. "This should not be a problem for us. We have worked hard on that as well, but it adds a lot of pressure!"[[In-content Ad]]
