ROGERS -- An unlikely group of students ranging in age from 5-11 formed a team that recently became the first from Arkansas to qualify for an international robotics competition in the elementary school division.
Fulbright achievement
Fulbright Junior High School dominated the middle school division of Saturday’s state VEX IQ Challenge, with three of its teams qualifying for the world championships. Those three teams have about 17 students combined, according to Dan Eddy, a Fulbright teacher who oversees the squads.
Source: Staff report
The team, called OverSTEMulated, consists of five students representing the Bentonville and Rogers school districts and Arkansas Arts Academy, a Rogers charter school.
It earned the Elementary School Excellence Award at the VEX IQ state tournament in Russellville on Saturday and a chance to compete at the world championship in Kentucky next month.
The team began meeting weekly in November at the academy. Justin Kilgo and Maverick Kempf, a pair of high school freshmen from Bentonville, are its assistant coaches.
Kilgo and Kempf bonded over their love of robotics while they were students at Bentonville's Washington Junior High School. They ended up going to different high schools -- Kempf to Bentonville High School, Kilgo to Bentonville West High School -- but found a way to continue working together by acting as the team's coaches and mentors.
"They're ready to learn," Kempf, 15, said about the team members. "Most of them here are eager and ready to get in and see what they can accomplish together. They start with something small, they build it, it gets done, and they look at each other and they're like, 'We did that.' It's something special."
"It's been fun," said Kilgo, 14. "I'm teaching them a lot of stuff. Currently we're starting to lengthen the drivetrain and just teaching them how to reattach things, different mechanics."
This year's VEX IQ Challenge is called Crossover, played on a 4-by-8-foot field. Each team must build a robot designed to pick up "hexballs" -- items shaped like six balls mashed together -- and deposit them in certain places. A team earns additional points by parking its robot on a ramp.
OverSTEMulated's 5-year-old member is Lilly Matthews, daughter of Blake Matthews, a science and technology teacher at Washington Junior High School.
Lilly, a student at Bentonville's Tennie Russell Primary School, previously was a "mascot" for the Washington Junior High team that her father coached.
"She was just walking around, having fun, pretending she was one of the kids' bosses," Matthews said. "And she told me that as she was watching one of the matches, 'I want to be up there next year.' So I wanted to give her that opportunity."
Lilly has moments when she acts like a typical preschooler, but she has been key to the team's success, Matthews said.
"It's been a group effort. She's not just a mascot," Matthews said.
Alexis Machuca, 8, is the next-youngest team member and a second-grader at Arkansas Arts Academy. Delia Machuca, her mother, said she was impressed by how Alexis did at the state tournament.
"Lilly and Alexis being the younger ones, I thought they might be somewhat out of hand, but not at all. They were both ready and eager to win, more than anything," Machuca said.
The other team members are Reese Coleman, an Arkansas Arts Academy fourth-grader, and Nathan Hayes and C.J. Hayes, brothers who attend Oakdale Middle School and Reagan Elementary School, respectively, in Rogers.
Last year's VEX IQ world championships attracted 500 teams representing 31 countries, Matthews said.
Vic Dreier, director of Arkansas' VEX program and of Arkansas Tech University's STEM Institute, said 50 teams competed in the state competition last weekend in the elementary, middle and junior high, and high school divisions.
STEM stands for science, technology, engineering and math.
"I am proud of these students for their ability to take what they've learned in the classroom and apply it to building and programming a competition robot from the ground up," Dreier said. "To give our young people exposure to STEM starting at even the earliest of ages is the key to our future as a state and as a nation."
Metro on 03/10/2017