Wenham Boy Wins Robotics Competition With School Team

WENHAM, MA — North Shore Christian School’s Lynn Robotics Club students competed in their third Southern New England VEX IQ Robotics tournament on Saturday and one of the players is a Wenham native.

McLaren Cook of Wenham is part of the middle school Steam Punks Team. The team brought home the victory, competing against 22 other middle and elementary schools to win both the Teamwork Champion Award and the Robot Skills Champion Award. The team scored 107 and 114 points respectively, achieving record-breaking totals for their region.

The Competition consists of seven match play events during which teams must use their robots to complete specific tasks within one minute. Ten teams are paired together to battle it out in the Final rounds, one of which was the Steam Punks Team.

During the Finals, the Steam Punks, with their partner team from Hopkinton, were the last team to compete and had to top a record-breaking score in order to claim the Teamwork Champion Award. The Steam Punks also earned the number 1 spot in the VEX IQ Southern New England Skills rankings. The team consists of seventh-grader Matthew Chatterton of Lynn, and eighth graders, Sebastiano Dimodica of Saugus, Matias W’Gebriel of Saugus and Cook.

The Steam Punks scored skills points for programming their robots to operate via remote control and autonomously, a complicated programming feat for students new to this arena.

Coach David Cook notes “It’s amazing how the kids’ love of math and science blossoms when they get to apply it in the real world. It’s particularly powerful for students who struggle with these subjects in school to see for themselves how much they can achieve.”