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Whiz Kids: Burbank Students Are Robot Masters

The magnet students participated in the 2011 MESA (Mathematics, Engineering, Science, Achievement) Robotics Challenge, which was held at USC.

Burbank Middle School Robotics Team: Diego Arrenquin, Anthony Gonzalez and Hector Loza.

Whiz Kid's Ages:12

Whiz Kid's School:

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Whiz Kid's Accomplishment: These Whiz Kids earned a third place finish in the middle school division at the 2011 MESA Robotics Challenge at USC.

Whiz Kid's Key to Awesomeness: "The week before the competition we stayed after school for three hours, everyday, testing the robot and making sure our presentation was really good," Anthony Gonzalez said.

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The seventh grade students designed and assembled a robot, using a Lego toolkit, that could detect a bomb located inside shipping containers. Their robot not only had to locate the containers, but also move them to a safe zone.

The team had five minutes during the challenge to complete both tasks.

"The hardest part was making sure that the program worked and testing it," Hector Loza said. "One of the problems we had was that it wouldn't sense it [the blocks] right away and it kind of wasted time. We fixed that by using another program."

Loza also said the team used a color sensor on their robot because red blocks were going to be used during the competition.

Balsawood blocks were used in the challenge to simulate shipping containers. The layout contained 20 containers, five of which were red colored, "nuclear" boxes.

The students' teacher, Andre Akins, guided the robotics team throughout the development process.

"I was pleased with their performance, not because they placed third, but because their performance on the day of the competition was commensurate with the preparation they put in prior to the competition," he said.

Diego Arrenquin shouldered the responsibility of navigating the robot through both rounds of the competition.

"My favorite part of the competition was designing it [the robot], making sure it would go right and the programming, that was my favorite," Arrenquin said.

In addition to building the bomb detecting robot, the team was also required to create a display of their project. They also gave an oral presentation from a randomly selected question.

Gonzalez said, "It makes us feel good because we only had three people and we finished higher than the last group of students from Burbank that competed."

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