When nine high school students boarded a flight this month, their destination was far away, but had a familiar name: Worcester. The teens are on a robotics team from Worcester, South Africa, that came to WPI to compete in one of the largest robotics competitions the campus has ever hosted.
The team, the Galactic Einsteins from Zwelethemba High School in Worcester, South Africa, was among more than 1,000 young people who participated in the first-ever WPI Annual FIRST LEGO League Event, held at Harrington Auditorium June 9-11. The 9-to-18-year-old participants represented nearly three dozen states and more than a dozen countries.
This was “certainly the most far-reaching of the competitions that we’ve run,” said Colleen Shaver, director of the Robotics Resource Center, which runs five to six robotics tournaments each year on campus for youth teams.
For the Galactic Einsteins, the competition was just the start of their experience at WPI and, for some, it was their first trip outside of South Africa.
After the competition, the Galactic Einsteins and their advisors spent over a week on campus to experience college life. They lodged in Messenger Hall, attended lectures about robotics, got lessons on engineering and Java programming, and operated the robots developed by the joint robotics team of WPI and The Massachusetts Academy of Math & Science at WPI.
Galactic Einsteins team member Lilitha Siyo, 16, said, “We learned about the different motors in robots, and how to make a robot go faster. We’ve been learning how to build a robot that can do missions.” The team plans to use the lessons it learned from WPI professors, students, and fellow roboticists on campus to improve its own robots.
