Magnolia Students Win In Robotics Lego League Challenge

On Thursday, Magnolia Elementary School's Lego League champions will have two things on their minds, robotics — and pizza.

Magnolia's Transformers won for robot performance in a weekend robotics qualifier match with For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) Lego League Challenge.

Now Magnolia's competing teams, all four of which scored in the top half during robotics' qualifying matches, will celebrate their successes.

A victory feast seemed far away on Saturday when the Transformers noticed their names were skipped, while other students who had competed with them at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel received participation awards.

The teammates became worried and concerned, according to Eva Fallon, a coach with the Eleanor Roosevelt High School robotics club and wife of the Magnolia team's instructor, George Boyce.

The students were sitting too far away for Fallon to tell them they weren't being left out. She couldn't get to them.

Fallon recalled the look on one of the girl's faces the moment she realized it meant they were winners — and watched as she quickly spread the word around.

Fears of defeat soon turned to victory, and the winning Transformers were lauded with awards, a plaque and medals.

There were four aspects to the competition: core values, robot design, presentation, and robot performance. When it came to robots, the Transformers rocked, Fallon said.

Although it's their first year to compete, , including the Tigers who competed with the Transformers on Saturday.

Interestingly, one of the skills that brought the students to the top had to do with rats. During the robot performance, teams choose their robots' missions from a list of possibilities.

"Their favorite mission is to capture a rat," Fallon said, although she wasn't sure why. Another mission they opted for was picking up food items, one of which — not surprisingly — was pizza.

On Jan. 28, the winning Transformers will shoulder the hopes of with them as they face off against 12 other regions and a total of 64 award winning teams in the state finals at UMBC.

All of the robotics students helped the winning team along the way and will be pulling for them, according to Fallon.

Also rooting for team Transformers will be a host of supporters and volunteers, including Boyce, Fallon and their Eleanor Roosevelt High School robotics club mentors.

The Transformers making it into the finals has been a morale boost for the school.

"It's a victory for the entire school pulling it of in the first year," Fallon said.