Westport Robotics Teams Take Top Honors in State Championships

Two Westport Middle School robotics teams - Team SNAP and The Mechanical Masterminds - took home four top awards from the First Lego League (FLL) State Robotics Championships held at Central Connecticut State University.

The Connecticut State Championship brought together the best 48 teams from around the state that competed among 200 teams during the regional qualifying rounds.

Team SNAP was awarded the Second Place Champion's Award. The FLL Champion's Award is the most prestigious award that an FLL team can win.  It is given to a team that demonstrates excellent performance in all three areas of Robot Design, Project, and Core Values. It recognizes a team's ability to inspire and motivate others about the excitement of science and technology, solve problems, and demonstrate respect and gracious professionalism to everyone involved in the competition.

The Mechanical Masterminds won First Place in the Robot Performance Challenge in which teams spend 12 weeks designing, programming, and building original robots that must complete a series of tasks and challenges within two and one half minutes in head to head competition. Out of the 48 best state teams, Mechanical Masterminds won First Place scoring 425 points.

The Mechanical Masterminds also won First Place in the Robotics Programming award, which recognizes the team that utilizes outstanding programming principles to write software that allows their robot to perform challenge missions autonomously and consistently.