CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA. (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) — For the second year in a row, St. Anne Belfield’s Grade 8 robotics team “Next Level” is preparing to head to the FIRST LEGO Robotics World Championship in Houston from April 29 to May 2.

After winning the 1st place award for robot design and 1st place for Virginia last year, the team will return to the championships after strong showings at local and regional competitions earlier in the fall.

“They’re the most motivated students that I have ever had the pleasure of working with in a robotics capacity,” Computer Science Coordinator K-8 Robbie Munsey told Cville Right Now. “They’re pretty impressive kiddos.”

Munsey, who is in his fourth year working with the robotics program at STAB, has worked with many of “Next Level’s” members since they were in sixth grade, including Spencer Boyd and Noah Cohoon. 

“I would genuinely say the people on the team are some of my closest friends at school and out of school,” Cohoon said.

Boyd echoed Cohoon’s sentiment, saying that the team is a “great community,” and he’s enjoyed getting to know his teammates over the years.

“I just love working with everyone,” he said.

Other members, like Ellie Canoles and Dorina Evans, started in 7th grade but have still felt a part of the team’s strong bond, with Evans saying they all went from teammates to “more of like a family” over the almost two years together.

“You can go to each other with your problems,” Evans said. “You can goof off, you still get the work done, but like you just feel so comfortable with each other that you just know you can trust them.”

Aside from creating new bonds, participating in the FIRST LEGO League has also led to “Next Level’s” member gaining new skills while tackling real problems.

The competition itself has two parts. The first involves designing and building a robot with LEGOs that can autonomously complete a list of challenges. But the second part of the competition, called the Innovation Project, goes beyond the plastic confines of LEGO bricks and challenges each team to find and solve a problem within a specific professional field based on that year’s theme.

For last year’s underwater theme, “Next Level” decided to tackle the issue of Right Whales getting caught in lobster traps during migration. Their solution was first-ever acoustically activated camera which is currently being used by the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration and is even patent pending.

“You would that because it’s FIRST LEGO League that everything’s LEGO,” Munsey said, “but that’s only the robot. The innovation project is a real engineering project, and so everything’s real. It starts with prototypes and very cheap materials, but as the kids figure out what works, they start building more and more of the real version.”

This year, with the theme of archeology, the team traveled to Colonial Williamsburg to visit real dig sites and find inspiration for their project. What they decided on was to build a float tank, a bucket type machine that uses a strainer to filter out small objects like fish scales and bone seeds, making sorting through soil much easier.

While the tank has been around for decades, it’s no longer being produced, so the team is currently in the process of reinventing it for their innovation project.

“It’s really, really cool,” Canoles said of the Innovation Project, “because like all these things are actually being used.”

She added that “Next Level” wasn’t the only team at last year’s World Championship whose project was patient pending, and that, “There were people with these amazing innovation projects innovation projects that you just can’t believe teenagers could come up with.”

Finishing their Innovation Project is just one of the many items on the team’s to-do list before they head to Houston in May. But while this year’s return trip will come with extra motivation, it will also be bittersweet as the team members prepare to move on to STAB’s upper campus next year.

As “Next Level’s” prepares for its last trip together, Evans said the team is focused on going out with a bang in a way that future LEGO Robotics teams will remember, both at STAB and beyond.

“We want to make an impact and have teams remember us, [and say] ‘Oh that team. Yeah, I remember hearing about them,'” she said.

But while Munsey believes this team can win, one of the coolest moments of the year so far for him came during the State Competition, when the 8th Graders from “Next Level” told the 6th Grade team, many of whom were nervous about if they had won, that they had already won by just making it there in the first place. He believe his students feel the same about Worlds.

“When they walk on that Worlds stage, they know they’ve already won, and they’ve already achieved,” he said, “and as a teacher, as a mentor, as a human being, I think that is what I’m most proud of about these kids.”