Middle School Robotics Team Qualifies for State Tournament

The Woodland Middle School Robotics team was in action on December 5^th at Salmon Creek Elementary School against 18 teams from Oregon and Southwest Washington. The Middle School team, once again, defended its championship title at the qualifying tournament and is bound for the Oregon State First Lego League Championship Tournament at Liberty High School in Hillsboro, Oregon, on January 16^th. This is the fourth time in the last five years that the Middle School has had a team that has qualified for the State Championship Tournament; and it is the third year in a row that it has won the Qualifying Tournament. Last year's team finished 2^nd place at the State Tournament. The first place team at the State Tournament will either go to the North American Championship in Dayton, Ohio or the World Championship in Atlanta, Georgia.

At the qualifying tournament, the "Transporjans" finished first in the robot competition, and also did very well in the teamwork competition, the technical judging of the robots and programs, and the research presentation. Team scores for the non-robot competitions are not released, so there is no way to tell exactly how the Woodland team did compared to the other teams in these areas. But, we do know that the Woodland Middle School team was the only team to score in the top quarter of the competitors in all four areas.

This year the theme for the research competition was transportation. The team chose to do a traffic flow study of the corner of Buckeye and Goerig Streets during the time period immediately after school and the report that they wrote is available here . The students were assisted by Kei Zushi from the City of Woodland, Walt Hansen from the Historical Society, and Jerry Sorrell, a traffic engineer from the CWCOG. The results were quite surprising, and the team will be presenting its research to the Woodland School District Board during the Board's monthly meeting on January 11^th. The team also hopes to demonstrate its robot and talk about the programming of the robot at the same time.