Hester Robotics Advances to STATE!

The TUFCRU (Teamwork, Unity, Friendship, Cooperation, Respect, Unwavering) Lego Robotics team competed in an all-day tournament on December 13^th at Lincoln Middle School in Mount Prospect against 15 other teams. The team pulled together, demonstrating key attributes such as teamwork, cooperation and creativity! They performed amazingly placing top four out of all the teams, qualifying for state in January! A Hester first! Mr. Mak was impressed and proud of every team member!

There are multiple sections of the competition in which the team is scored on. The first is robotic performance, in which each team has 4 (four), 2-minute trials to complete as many missions as time allows. At the beginning of the year every team is given the same twelve missions to build and then have to build and program a robot that completes the given task at each mission. Each mission is worth a specific amount of points and varied based on the difficulty. The TUFCRU finished third place in this section.

The other sections include Robot Design, Research Presentation and Core Values. For each of these, the team had to go into a room and were judged, interviewed and graded. Robot Design consists of the students explaining to the judges how they came up with and their thoughts behind their design. For the Research Project the students needed to pick a concept they learn in school and come up with an innovative way of learning it. There are two parts to Core Values. In the first part, the team was given the task of blind-folding one member and using the guidance of the other members, the blind-folded had to put together a puzzle. Sixth grader Ryan Smith stepped up, took on the tough challenge and did amazing. For the second part, the judges asked the team questions about the values they set and how they upheld them.

The TUFCRU team consisting of 8^th graders James Adamczyk, Tyler Franklin, Robbie Morris, Andrew Rosado, 7^th graders Rafael Diaz, Jonathan Gomez, Maya Gronkowski, Allan Lyth, Dannalee Mata, Irvin Ortiz, Juvontae Sykes, Josh Uy and 6^th graders Elmer Diaz and Ryan Smith will be competing at the state championship on January 17^th, in Elgin in a field of 64 teams!