Middle Schoolers in the JLA robotics proved themselves last year by competing in CIJE in New York and coming home with fourth place, but will they be able to continue to impress us all with their skills this year?
Chloe Benichou, a JLA 8th grader in her second year, talked a little about last year’s competitions, and she said, “Last year for Robotics competitions the first competition locally was at BMA. So in JLA, we have different teams who build their own robots, so we had one team place first, another place second, and our team placed third. And with those standings, we were able to go to New York for the national competition.”
Isabella Enchenwald Braghin, a sixth grader and new to robotics, talked a little about the competitions our middle school team would be competing in this year, saying, “So really were preparing for one main competition and we have this other competition I think its the Lego competition. We’re more focused on VEX IQ because it’s more important and we build robots that kind of have balls in them and throw the balls at targets and is a competition where you have to use coding yet you still have to build. So you use a mix of skills.”
Through this information, it’s clear that the schematics of both last year’s and this year’s competitions are very complex and the kids undertaking the hard task of working on these robots are quite ingenious.
Ms. Gigi, who taught robotics both this year and last, talked a little about the challenges that the three teams last year face and also about her hopes for this year stating, “so last year we competed in one competition from CIJE from Florida with all the Florida Jewish schools CIJE stands for Center Inshteve for Jewish Education and they host VEX competitions every year in every different state and they have the major one in New York.”
She went on to say about last year, “we didn’t get to go to many competitions because last year robotics and fab lab were one option nine so the teams last year had less time to work on their robots. So we had three teams and all of them placed well with one winning first place another getting third and the other team placed somewhere in the top ten out of twenty-five other teams so they all went very well.”
Ms. Gigi then started to talk about this year and said, “this year we have just the robotics class and six teams competing. I think this year we’re going to be a lot better prepared than last year because we already went once so we know how it works we have the competition field the robots are basically ready. We have more time to prepare this year.”
She ended by saying, “I hope that we can do even better this year and I feel like we have a great group of students who are highly motivated and dedicated to the competition. And I feel great about this year.”
Overall our middle school robotics team is amazing and our entire student body wishes them luck as they strive to surpass not just the other competitors but also themselves.
Good luck and great job.
