The Couch Botatoes, a robotics team from Urbana and Frederick, places second in the First Lego League state championships in April. Team members pictured, from left: Vansh Kumar, Nainitha Chalamalasetty, Aditi Senthilkumar, Abhi Senthilkumar (high school youth mentor), Praneel Pandit and Mihir Kumar.
Couch Botatoes is a robotics team from Urbana and Frederick that competed in the Maryland First Lego League state championship in April. They were sponsored in part by Art of Problem Solving (AoPS), Gaithersburg. The team placed second among 21 teams in the synchronous group for the number of points they earned in the robot game competition. In addition, they placed second (championship finalists) overall as a result of their combined scores in the robot design, innovation project, robot game and core values sections.
First Lego League is built around theme-based challenges to engage children ages 9 to 16 in research, problem solving, coding and engineering. The challenge has four parts — robot competition, robot design evaluation, innovation project and demonstration of how FLL core values have guided the team through the season.
The Couch Botatoes team, consisting of five Urbana area elementary and middle school STEM enthusiasts, worked for nine months on this year’s RePlay challenge. They were mentored by Urbana High School student Abhi Senthilkumar and two parent coaches, Senthil Ramaswamy and Sesha Jupudi.
This year, the team had specific learning goals they set out to accomplish. Their base robot had a compact design with a clever adapter to quickly add and remove attachments that could accomplish a variety of pre-determined missions. Using color sensors, they were able to program their robot to reach the target locations on the game map and accomplish a variety of tasks to earn points. The team also developed attachments with built-in gear boxes to lift loads and drop blocks at various locations as dictated by the mission requirements. In the competition, the team scored the second highest number of points in their division (Group 2, Synchronous) and consequently earned second place in the robot game section.