The Athenians were one of 12 teams competing, and as first place winners, moved on to the Northern New Jersey Regional Competition on Dec. 8 and 9 at Mount Olive High School, according to information provided by Brooke Kienle.
This year’s theme was Into Orbit, which challenged teams to identify a physical or emotional problem associated with long-term space travel within the solar system, and then solve that problem. The Athenians identified boredom as a key challenge, then conducted research online and through in person interviews with subject matter experts, to come up with an innovative t-shirt that would take up minimal room on a spaceship but would also keep astronauts entertained with its chalkboard fabric, jokes, riddles, National Days flip book and a pocket to store other items. In addition, they built a robot out of LEGOS and programmed it to complete eight of the 15 table top challenges using the Mindstorms coding program, according to the statement.
At both the qualifying and regional competitions, the Athenians participated in three 5-minute presentations – one on their innovative solution, one on how they met FLL’s Core Values and one on their robot design. They also had three opportunities to run their robot through its table-top challenges. During the qualifying competition, the Athenians came in third place in the robot run, with a score of 106 points, and in first overall, based on their performance in the three presentations, as well as their robot run, according to the statement.
The Northern New Jersey Regional event was attended by 80 teams, with the winning two teams moving on to the World Championship which will take place in April 2019 in Houston and Detroit. Unfortunately, the Athenians did not win any awards at the regional event, but their presentations were well-received, and they scored a robot run score of 124, which represented the maximum number of points they could receive for the number of challenges they were able to accomplish, according to the statement.