Lego teams head to championship

Grafton School District’s first two Lego League Challenge robotics teams will advance to the compete at the state championship in February.

The school district teams earned top spots among 24 teams throughout the state in preliminary rounds of the competition and will travel to Madison on Feb. 6 to compete against the best of the best.

 Early rounds of the competition had teams explore ways of improving the transportation of goods from place to place.

The teams were evaluated on their innovation project, core values and robot design and performance.

Team Refried Beans, made up of Woodview Elementary and John Long Middle School students in grades fifth through eighth, looked at the inefficiencies of hand mail delivery in small towns like Grafton.

The team designed a super tube delivery truck that would use a pneumatic tube to enable a mail carrier to deliver to mailboxes on the sides of homes without having to leave their delivery truck. The tube would include a variety of sensors to ensure no people, pets or landscaping are injured during the delivery process.

The team was awarded the second place Champion’s Award at their first qualifier tournament on Nov. 20.

The Random Engineers, a team of sixth through eighth grade students at John Long Middle School, seek to improve rural mail delivery by using airborne drones to deliver mail and small packages directly to people’s homes.

They developed a prototype mailbox that communicates with the drone to exchange incoming and outgoing packages, then alerts the owner when mail has arrived. The team received Robot Design Awards and second place Robot Performance Award at each of their qualifier tournaments on Nov. 13 and Dec. 18.