Good Shepherd Lutheran School team advances to world championship in VEX IQ Robotics

A team of three girls from Good Shepherd Lutheran School in Sioux Falls is advancing to the world’s championship in a robotics competition.

Eighth grader Lainey Hermanson and seventh graders Tatum Wright and Ava Costine, from the team called “Robocore,” will attend the VEX IQ Robotics Competition for grades fourth through eighth on May 1-3 in Dallas with coach Scott Georgson. They leave for the competition after school April 29 and will face hundreds of teams from more than 40 different countries.

The team qualified for the world championship after winning the excellence award at the state championship for middle school teams in March at Canton High School. Tiger Robotics, from Harrisburg, won in the elementary school division and also qualified for the VEX IQ Robotics Competition world championship.

All this month, Robocore has been remodeling its robot for a challenge in which the robot picks up green and purple blocks and moves them to goals in the corners of a 6-foot by 8-foot rectangular field, or knocks over bigger red blocks on the field to score points. It also gains points for parking in a red zone in the corner of the field.

There are different challenges to control the robot manually with a remote, or to code and program it to run. The team is scored on their dynamic, interview, engineering skills and engineering notebook, which Hermanson has meticulously filled out in neat handwriting.

This will be Hermanson’s second year at the tournament. She said she enjoys the teamwork aspect and finds it to be a fun challenge with design and engineering skills involved.

“It’s fun to push ourselves to the limits and see what we can really do,” teammate Wright said.

Good Shepherd Lutheran School enrolled only 52 K-8 students this school year, but coach Scott Georgson, who has done robotics at the school for six years, tries to get almost all of those students involved in robotics as the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) director for the school, and as a seventh and eighth grade teacher.

Both Wright and Costine have been involved in robotics at the school since fifth grade. Hermanson is newer to the school and thought it would be good to get involved in extracurriculars by choosing robotics.

“We are just really grateful that we get to represent our state, our little school, our Savior, and just introduce this activity to others and inspire kids, especially girls, to explore STEM,” Hermanson said in a press release.

Georgson said Robocore is good at being creative, and at sharing the workload of designing and coding the robot to run.

He said he likes to see Robocore’s “God-given abilities in working as a team, carrying themselves at tournaments, having a growth mindset and growing throughout the season.”

This article originally appeared on Sioux Falls Argus Leader: Good Shepherd Lutheran School team preps for world robotics championship