Local Vienna Kids Head to State LEGO Robotics Championship

They went into the competition joking with each other that they hoped they wouldn’t come in last, but these six Vienna-area elementary school students surprised themselves by earning first place in the VA/DC Division 1 First LEGO League Robotics competition held Saturday, November 9th at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office Building in Alexandria, Virginia.

Fifth graders Hridhaan Banerjee, Sean Collins, Jayden Dong, Dhruv Iyer, Michael Philipov and Oliver Tabbal have been working tirelessly with their coaches to prepare. The theme of this year’s competition was “City Shaper” and asked the question “What if you could build a better world? Where would you begin?”

The teammates decided that they would work to build more inclusive playgrounds - places for children of all abilities to be able to play and enjoy themselves. They interviewed playground designers, parents of children with special needs, and even a Vienna parks and recreation staff member, Ms. Brandy Wyatt, to create a recommendation that blew the judges away during their 5-minute presentation. In addition to this research project, the kids also spent time designing, building and coding their robot to complete missions on an obstacle course, and they received consistently high marks during the four rounds on competition day.

The next stop for these future engineers is the State competition, held at James Madison University on December 7th and 8th.