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Lego Competition Sends Kids to Orlando
01/17/10 - 09:21 PM
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Allyson Walker - bio
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click for larger image Panama City Beach, Fla:

A group of Panama City Beach students are showing off their engineering skills this weekend and now they’re preparing to compete in a state competition in Orlando, but getting to this point hasn’t been an easy road.

It’s called Lego League and students basically have to build their own robots and present a research project to a set of judges who work in the engineering field.  These students say they want to be tomorrow’s engineers and they’re getting a head start right now.

Students watch as their Lego League robots run the obstacle course. The goal—for the robots to successfully navigate the tests, but these are no ordinary robots. Students themselves built them. It takes planning and time and energy to build the robot.

Meredith Bush is captain of the Baybots of Surfside Middle.  She says it took awhile to decide how they’d build their robot:  “We looked at a bunch of different designs and just kind of took pieces from each one to make one.”

Trial and error determine what works and what doesn’t. Judges like Andrew Bouchard say that the problem solving skills kids acquire are invaluable to them in the future “…first of all, there’s that engineering, problem solving mentality that’s applicable in a wide range of things. I mean engineers go on to become anything from doctors to lawyers because of that mentality of identifying a problem, breaking it down into manageable pieces, and finding solutions to each of the pieces…”

The other part of the Lego league competition is a research project. Coach Joe Gresham says he sees kids grow tremendously throughout the process “…everything from presentation skills to technical knowledge and abilities, I mean developing that…it’s important. Even the working together will allow them to succeed in the future…”

The kids say that all the team work definitely pays off “…Go Baybots!”

Yesterday’s Lego league competition was the first regional tournament for the panhandle. Thirteen teams from as far away as Tallahassee came to compete. Four teams will advance to the finals in Orlando in May.

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