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Six Alamance and Guilford county kids are headed to an international Lego robotics competition in April.

In its first year, Team Rex won the FIRST Lego League state championship (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology).

The success took its members by surprise. “We were screaming and yelling,” 11-year-old Lena Stein said. “I think we worked really hard. We put a lot into it and tried to do our best.”
 

The children range in age from 9 to 13. Lena and her brother, Benny, attend Elon Elementary School, along with teammate Tobias Fischer.
Jan Fischer attends Western Alamance Middle School with teammate Gavin Koonts. Owen Gold, 12, is homeschooled in Whitsett. Tobias and Jan’s dad, Jochen Fischer is the head coach, but all of the parents have supported the team and attend the meetings.
 

Before their state win, Team Rex met twice a week for at least an hour and a half. Now the group is meeting even more often.
 

“We ended up being a team as parents, too,” said Elke Ruggaber, Tobias and Jan’s mother.
 

Before the state competition, Team Rex had eight weeks to build a Lego-based robot and program it to do certain tasks in less than two and a half minutes. The children also had to analyze and research a real-world problem and develop a solution. They chose to make a Western Alamance Middle School bus route faster and safer.
 

The children work well as a team and bring different skills to the group, their parents said. For example, Gold loves to program and design the robot, and Lena used her writing skills to develop the skit the team had to present to the judges to explain their bus project.

“I like it because you get to be creative,” such as finding loopholes in the task’s directions, said Benny Stein, Lena’s brother. He also liked the research aspects of the challenge.
Owen said they stood out among other teams because all six of them got to oversee a “run,” when the robot performed a series of tasks. There were three runs, so each time a different pair controlled the robot.
 

Ruggaber said the children are friends and have a fun time together, and their excitement was evident to the judges.
 

She said the FIRST Lego League program has taught the children public speaking skills and other things that will be valuable in the adult world. They really took ownership of the challenge, she said.
 

“This is the kind of education I’ve always wanted them to have, self-directed learning,” she said.
 

Team Rex will compete against more than 80 teams from around the world during the two-and-a-half day event in April. The children are making 800 buttons — some with their T-Rex dinosaur logo and others with a school bus design — to trade with the other competitors.

Contact Jamie Kennedy Jones at 373-7088 or jamie.kennedy@news-record.com