Posted on: Monday, April 1, 2002

Local team among best at robotics competition

Associated Press

SAN JOSE, Calif. — A team from Waialua High School was among the winners in a regional robotics competition and will be invited to the national competition later this month in Orlando, Fla.

Teams from around the West convened Saturday with the robots they built to see whose machine had the greatest appetite for collecting soccer balls and stuffing them into a goal.

A three-team alliance won. The winning teams were from Kingman High School in Kingman, Ariz.; San Jose's Bellarmine College Preparatory; and Waialua High School.

The competition was designed to instill a love of engineering in U.S. students, who have performed poorly on international math and science exams.

The competition was conceived by inventor Dean Kamen, perhaps best known for the Segway scooter unveiled earlier this year, and was sponsored by the nonprofit organization For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology.

"We really worked hard at making a game that has the excitement and trappings of real sports," Kamen said Saturday. "But unlike professional sports, where the kids are merely spectators, they're out there on the field with the experts."

These experts were engineers from major companies who had six weeks to help students from 50 teams build the robots.

The task Saturday was to maneuver the robots to collect soccer balls and deposit them into a goal.

Along with teams from 16 other regional competitions, the winners will be invited to the championship April 25 to 27 at Walt Disney World's Epcot Center. They're also eligible for more than $1.7 million in scholarships.