In a league of their own

SUTHERLANDS RIVER - Teamwork, tinkering and time management paid off for a robotics squad from East Pictou Middle School as they claimed top prize in the First Lego League Smart Move robot programming competition.
The funny thing is, they were thinking about not even making the drive to Acadia University in Wolfville on the weekend. In they end they were pretty glad they did.
"We were considering staying home. The weather was pretty bad, but we worked it out," team spokesman Erik Kowalski said.
When they go to Acadia they were up against 19 other teams from across the province.
Each team got three tries to put their robot through a challenge field with the highest of their three scores taken to decide their rank. The first time through the field the East Pictou crew scored a 230 which dropped to a score of 60 in the second run through.
"Lots of teams did bad the second time," team member Damien Odo said.
Following some quick tinkering between rounds, the East Pictou boys rallied and roared back with a score of 270 which put them 20 points ahead of their nearest competitor and at the top of the heap.
"We've been working on the robot's design and programming since late September," said Kowalski. "It was taking a long time to get a good design and get the programming down."
Although they worked on the robot since the first month of school, it was still a work in progress on game day.
"We were still working on it Saturday at the competition. We had time to reorganize and make slight changes," Kowalski added. "We didn't change too much."
Each team in the competition was given all the parts they needed to build a robot but could add parts that they already had, if needed. They each got a copy of the challenge field to aid their progress and testing.
Kowalski, Ryan Pitts and Nick Charlton entered the competition last year and placed ninth of 30 teams.
When this year rolled around they started with basically the same machine, plus two new team members. The machine went back to square one.
"We destroyed everything and went from there," Odo said.
But that wasn't such a good idea, added Kowalski, since they had to do most of their original work over again.
"We actually regretted tearing it apart."
One thing they didn't regret was taking part in the first place.
"I liked going to it," said Timothy Klein. "It was a good way to learn about robotics and stuff like that."