CLEARWATER, Fla. — This summer 96 middle school robotics teams from 46 states and 23 countries met in Daytona Beach to see who could design the best robot. When it was all said and done, the winning team was from Discovery Academy of Science in Clearwater.
The students call themselves the Captivating Construction Crew. However, they aren’t paving streets or filling potholes; they are saving the environment.
WATCH full report by Robert Boyd
It may look like simple fun with Legos, but if you ask their teacher, Julie Bradbury, this robotics project has been three years in the making.
Bradbury said she knew they were special from day one.
“They’ve been awesome kids, I teach them, so I get to know these students on a daily basis, and they spend more time with me than I think they do their parents,” said Bradbury.
“We worked almost every single week, five days a week, for like three hours at a time,” said student Bryce Baker.
From the designing to the building, to the programming, these students not only create their own robot, but they also pick a problem affecting the world and try to come up with a solution.
“We chose coral bleaching,” said Baker. “Coral creates a lot of the oxygen and stuff in our atmosphere and the ecosystems in the water. The solution we came up with was to create large shading devices that would shade a section of coral over a 12-hour period. It’s believed that coral shading can decrease the rate of bleaching by up to 60 percent.”
The team’s success earned them a spot at the Sunshine Florida Invitational in Daytona Beach, where they competed against 96 other schools from 46 states and 23 countries.
“It was really impressive seeing all of these kids our same age from all over the world with different languages, different cultures, it was really interesting and really fun as well,” said student Ian Rodriguez.
They even got paired up with a team from Macedonia.
“So they have to run both robots, Macedonia team robot and our team robot at the same time to get as many points as they can without crashing into each other, so it was a new challenge for them, they’ve never done that before,” said Bradbury.
When the judges made their final decision, it was the kids from Clearwater holding the Robot Design Award.
“I could not believe it, it was so crazy, none of us even expected that we would have gotten that far,” said Baker.
“I’m so proud, I mean our team, we just created something special; it’s called hard work pays off,” said student Skyler Winfield.
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