IWA Students Win Trophy in Regional Robotics Championship

Incarnate Word Academy Robotics students from Mr. Howard Ludlow's robotics classes competed in the FIRST LEGO Robotics Regional Championship held in San Antonio, Texas on Mar. 23.

The IWA Robotics team named the ANGELBOTS won the trophy for Best Project and came in fifth out of 58 teams in the Robot Game for an overall fifth place finish. Out of the 50,000 teams participating in this competition, IWA placed in the top 1,000 teams worldwide.

The IWA ANGELBOTS team members are eighth grader Alek Brysch and seventh graders Gabriel Armstrong, Eldon Cass, Andy Kretsinger, and Diego Roberts.

FIRST LEGO is the largest robotics competition in the world with more than 50,000 teams from 100 countries around the world competing against each other each year. The 2018-2019 competition, titled Into Orbit, dealt with all aspects of space and space travel. 

During the Robot Game segment, participating teams have to program their robots to perform a series of Missions or challenges within 2 minutes and 30 seconds, with the successful completion of each challenge accumulating points for the team. In the Project portion, teams must also complete a science project in which they determine and define a real-world problem pertaining to space, design a solution, and defend that solution against a panel of judges.

The ANGELBOTS’ project compared the pros and cons of various types of rocket fuel and proposed a chemically correct formula for a hybrid rocket fuel that offered better performance. The team also met with an aerospace engineer in Corpus Christi and skyped with a scientist and former astronaut from the Indian Space Agency.

The ANGELBOTS previously won the Championship of the Corpus Christi qualifying tournament in order to compete in this event, which had 58 teams from other qualifying tournaments from the 400-plus teams in the local region.