The Guam Department of Education Lego competition was a first for competitors the Guam Daily Post spoke with on Sunday, who said the Galaxy Bot Battle took them to new heights.
The competition saw competitors from middle schools and high schools both public and private, among them Southern High School Junior Collin Duenas, whose interest in robotics was recently reignited.
“I haven't done anything like this since sixth grade and once my teacher reintroduced this to us, I thought it was a good idea to get back into it, and it's really fun. So, it's a good way to connect with people that I've never met before,” Duenas said.
Duenas, along with his team, began working on his Lego robot about a month ago, creating a robot that’s a mix of a sweeper and a dropper.
“We have a robot that's able to reach over the wall and drop the game aspects and then if they drop it on our side, we have a sweeper component to it to where we could bring it to our safe zone and get rid of their points on the board,” he explained.
The Galaxy Bot Battle set the stage for the Lego robots, which Duenas said reminded him of "Star Wars."
“I believe it’s based off of 'Star Wars,' so there are different aspects like laser blast and protons and lightsabers, and each of those aspects cost points,” Duenas said.
Each team had two Lego robots and up to five team members, who competed in five rounds. Duenas had just finished up his third round before speaking with the Post.
“We have the builders, which is me, Luis and Anthony Pashes, then we have our two programmers, Mikku Thomas and Caleb Canat. And then we have a surprise fifth member that he's not really official, he just came to support, Adrian Abbad,” he said.
Duenas wasn’t just in the competition to win, he said, he was there to represent his school.
“Southern's not known for these kinds of things, we’re known for bad stuff in the media, like for fighting and all these riots. But this is something to prove that we're more than that; that us as a community down south, we're not just all bad people, that we're smart, and we could do different things,” Duenas said.
It was also the first competition for the Academy of our Lady of Guam team. AOLG junior Akaya Wilson told the Post, “I decided to join robotics as well as my teammates, and we are the only juniors in our robotics class, and we decided to make a team and participate.”
The team created a robot that could push and maneuver.
“We realized that it may be the easiest to do because you wouldn't have to worry about eating up so much time with the coding because the robot is moving as it's pushing. So, it would be more efficient,” Wilson said.
The Academy team members had just finished their five rounds of competition and believed they “did good.”
“I think we could have done better at some point in time, but for us, it was really a learning experience about how to collaborate and communicate effectively and coming out here and representing our school was the most important thing to us,” she said.
Teammate Beatrice Antonio said she joined the competition because she hopes to be an engineer in the future and believed the experience, although intimidating, could be helpful.
“I definitely feel I'm a little nervous and intimidated because I'm not as experienced as my peers or the other competitors, but I feel like I'm learning a lot, and it's really nice collaborating with the other schools and working with them, it's a lot of problem-solving and I think that it's very helpful,” Antonio said.
She said she’s learned about the importance of precision and accuracy, as well as trial and error by participating in the competition.
“Because your code might be accurate, but the way you position your robot, it may not be as precise, and if it's not as precise, then the code won't work. So, the most important thing I've learned here today is trial and error that you just have to keep on fixing your mistakes and if it doesn't work out the first time, just keep on going,” Antonio said.
Thirteen teams from middle schools and high schools across the island competed in the event, which GDOE said challenged the students to design, build and program their Lego battle robots to navigate through obstacles in the head-to-head competitions.
“This competition promotes a stage for Guam’s future engineers, programmers and science, technology, engineering and mathematics leaders. Students gain valuable hands-on experience in robotics, coding and automation, preparing them for larger regional and international competitions,” GDOE said in a press release.