Ely LEGO team competes in Minot tourney

Ben Pifher/PCT Ely Elementary’s Blobs, from left to right, Quinn Nelson, Owen Roberts, Lela Kramer, Beckett Welk and Mason Bohl take part in the Full Steam Ahead LEGO tournament at Minot State University on Jan. 25.
The Ely Elementary LEGO League competed against 14 other teams from schools around the area in Minot last Saturday, coming in second for robot design.
Teams designed, built and programmed robots to complete as many missions as possible within a time limit.
Excited parents, coaches and competitors cheered their favorite teams on, and crowded around two tables in a gymnasium at Minot State University to watch the robots compete.
The teams were given the layout and missions in August 2024, according to Ali Auch, the event’s executive director, and were able to develop their plan and programs even on the day of the competition. She explained each team had three attempts to complete the missions, with 45 minutes between each attempt when they could practice or modify their robots.
Each robot faced 15 missions where they had to manipulate different items in different ways, navigating through the cluttered tables.
Jill Roberts, team coach for Ely Elementary, said her team learned the different missions from a video, then decided which they wanted to try for, based on the number of points each was worth and how difficult it was to complete. Some objects were meant to be pushed to certain spots, others lifted and placed certain ways.
The robots were reset between each mission attempt, with the teams orienting them on markers, sometimes using LEGO jigs, but from there the robots were all autonomous.
“It’s all pre-coded,” Roberts said. “At this point they’re just lining it up, and pushing the button and hoping it all goes well.”
Auch said if the team touched the robot while it was performing a mission, they would suffer a penalty.
Before the robots competed in their missions, each team presented an innovation project and was interviewed by judges. This year’s theme was undersea exploration, and teams tackled problems faced by explorers. The solutions varied widely from developing better tagging systems for sharks, to tackling the problem of rivers feeding pollution into the oceans. Ely’s team’s goal was to prevent sharks from damaging undersea exploration equipment.
Roberts said the judges made the interviews fun for the kids by asking fun questions, along with challenging ones.
Warren Gamas, one of the competition’s judges, said the judges weren’t looking at the idea so much as the process on how the teams worked toward their goals. Teams were encouraged to reach out to professionals in related fields, and they did, he said.
The teams were judged on aspects of teamwork and design, meant to teach them about the ethics, teamwork and collaboration required for engineering design challenges, Gamas said. Those were robot design, the robot run, their innovation project and judges also considered the team’s Core Values, in which they were judged on their ethics, teamwork and collaboration. “That didn’t have anything to do with how the robot ran out there, but it’s an important piece to what LEGO league is about,” Gamas said.
Rugby placed second place in robot design. Six other teams advanced to the state competition to be held in Grand Forks. Those teams, in no order of rank, were the Barracudas, Sea Lions, Good Vibes and Six Flying Sharks, all of Minot; the Honker Bots of Kenmare and the Dino Nuggies of Underwood.