The Saint Bridget Middle School robotics team won the state championship and is heading to the FIRST LEGO League World Championships in Houston Texas over Spring Break.

Meet the team and see the robot at Saint Bridget School’s STEM Quest Open House on January 30 from 10am-12pm .

The competition involves programming and engineering LEGO robots to autonomously complete a variety of tasks over a long obstacle course. The ten-member middle school team, Clueless, earned the highest robot score out of the 72 teams competing at the State Champion-ship on Dec. 5.

Robotics Team Coach and Saint Bridget teacher, Eric DeBoer is proud of the teams’ success but also for bringing a bit extra to the competition. “The competition holds certain core values including teamwork, inclusion, discovery, innovation, impact, and others, but our students uphold an even higher standard of values as Catholics and Christians. As an educator, I'm fulfilled and encouraged when I see students learning and growing and I'm seeing this in the team as they progress in the competition.”

In addition to the obstacle course win, the team had their innovation project, BusBox, nominated for the Global Innovation Award which challenges students to solve a problem in their community. BusBox seeks to maximize the utility of school busses and school bus drivers to complete last-mile package deliveries. “Many schools and school districts have busses sitting idle during the day when they could be out delivering packages to rural routes that Amazon and other delivery companies have trouble serving. This could lead to better utilization of the busses and more full-time jobs for bus drivers.” The team will be meeting with Saint Bridget parishioner and Virginia Senator, Siobhan Dunnavant to propose changing a law in Virginia that would make their proposal possible.

The team will be fundraising $30,000 to compete against teams from North America, Europe, and Asia, and appreciate your support and prayers as they prepare for the spring.