(MULTIMEDIA) 'Lego Maniacs' Head to State Lego League Competition

It’s Friday afternoon, and students everywhere are just getting ready to enjoy another weekend. But in one Minnetonka home, a group of five eighth graders are working hard to perfect their robot.

Spencer Ashford, Zach Carman, Noah Hughes, Zach Myers and Dan Pratt make up the “Lego Maniacs”—a team competing in the FIRST Lego League competition. The Lego Maniacs earned the Best Project Award at the regional competition and placed second in the Robot Head-to-Head category. On Saturday, they’ll compete against 25 other teams in the state competition at Washington Technology School.

“I thought it would be really fun (when I joined), and it was,” Zach Carman says about the team.

Preparing for the competition is an investment of time that began in September. The team—coached by parent volunteers Lorraine Myers and Pam Carman—must build and program a robot to score points on a playing field by completing certain tasks.

(Click on the video above to watch the robot complete two tasks.)

The robot is made of Legos and controlled by small computer that the boys program. Although they know the tasks, it’s up to them to build a robot that completes those tasks in a way that gathers the maximum points in the competition’s two-and-a-half-minute rounds.

This encourages them to experiment and test out different designs. When trying to find out why their robot wasn’t picking up all the Lego fish at one station, the boys even used their phones to videotape from various angles and identify the problem.

Myers said FIRST founder Dean Kamen created the competitions because he “thought geeks need a stadium sport.”

“You have all these kids getting excited about science and technology, and they feel good about it,” Myers says.

The Lego Maniacs aren’t geeks in the Hollywood sense, though. Most of them participate in sports, although they say the Lego League competition is actually tougher. Their practices and research sessions could last six to eight hours at a time. In all, Myers estimates the team invested about 100 hours of work into the three categories for the regional tournament alone.

‘There’s a reason why we got the top place,” Spencer says.

Says Zach Carman: “It was hectic. We had to run around like crazy.”

The team also had to develop an innovative solution to a problem related to the competition’s theme, which was “food safety” this year. The Lego Maniacs learned about a Today Show investigation that found some refrigerator truck drivers turned off cooling units to maximize profits.

The boys toured Fresh Seasons and the West Junior High kitchens and e-mailed a University of Wisconsin professor to gather research. They then developed a device that uses memory wire to trigger a timer that allows stores to see how long food sat in unsafe temperatures.

“It sets them off doing a ton of research,” Myers says.

But even though getting to state involves a lot of work, it’s clearly worth it for the boys.

“Legos are fun and so are robots,” Dan says.

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Vote for the Lego Maniacs’ Design

In addition to competing in the state competition, the Lego Maniacs submitted their research design for the Global Innovation Award.  The award is designed to encourage and help First Lego League teams to further develop innovative solutions to real-world problems. 

Online voting will select 10 semifinalist teams, and a panel of judges will select 10 more semifinalists based on merit.

The winning team will have a chance to work with consumer product developer Edison Nation to develop, produce and take their invention to market. One team selected by the National Center for Food Protection and Defense will also win a trip to the International Association of Food Protection annual conference in Rhode Island.

Click here to read more about the Lego Maniacs’ design and to vote for their invention.