WILLISTON, Vt. (WCAX) – In a basement in Williston, a small gang of fifth and sixth graders fiddle with a robot they coded themselves.
Arielle Brkovik, Emilyn Leinen, Ted Agnew and JJ Garcia are homeschooled but found each other through a shared love of creation. Together, they formed Green Mountain Homeschool Robotics. The team competes in First Lego League, a robotics program challenging kids across the world with stem-based Lego projects.
“We started out with like no experience last year and we just worked our way up,” Garcia explained.
Using Legos, electronic devices and coding software, Green Mountain Homeschool Robotics created a robot that navigates a series of Lego-based challenges. They just won a state championship for their design and are onto Houston next for the world championship. The team showed me how their award-winning robot works.
“This is a spike prime robot,” Garcia said. “It uses four motors and a built in gyro sensor and we have multiple attachments.”
“The laptop that we have controls the hub, the hub controls the motors and these attachments can do almost everything,” Agnew chimed in.
If coding a robot isn’t impressive enough, First Lego League also challenges teams to create a service project to better their community. Green Mountain Homeschool Robotics designed a kit and app that guides visually impaired people through stone carving. The project honors Garcia’s grandfather, an artist who lost his vision due to diabetes.
“My grandfather was actually blind and we think he would have really liked this,” Garcia said. “He died two years ago.”
Garcia’s grandmother, Tara Zeleny, says she believes the project could be life-changing for people like her late husband.
“A blind person’s fingers are their eyes,” Zeleny said. “So as they are involved in the tactile portion of that art form, I’m sure it’s very freeing.”
Garcia smiles at the thought of honoring his grandfather.
“That would make me feel really good to know that other blind people could have the joy of stone carving,” Garcia said.
Green Mountain Homeschool Robotics has raised nearly $1,500 of the $12,000 needed to get to the world championship in Houston in April.
