The “Saturn V Girls” team includes Nina Dave, Anika Kapoor, Sydney Slay, Jayna Dave and Celine Ebert. Anoop Padmanabhan and emcee Ken Berry are in the back row. Photography by JerSean Golatt.
The “Saturn V Girls” team, made up of students from The Hockaday School won first at the 11th-annual North Texas FIRST LEGO® League (FLL) Regional Championship Robotics Tournament Feb. 9 at Parish Episcopal School and Community Center. The event is an engineering competition that challenges students to use knowledge and creativity to build robots to solve problems. This season’s challenge was called “Into Orbit.” Winning qualifies the team to advance to the World Festival in Houston April 17-20. Members of the “Saturn V Girls” are Nina Dave, Anika Kapoor, Sydney Slay, Jayna Dave and Celine Ebert. They beat 60 teams by building and programming an autonomous robot using LEGO® MINDSTORMS technology to score points in 2.5-minute “mission” matches on a space-themed playing field. The event was produced by the Perot Museum of Nature and Science and supported by ARCO/Murray, Rockwell Collins and USAA.
This year’s competition began in August 2018, when 4,600 North Texas students ages 9-14 – and approximately 323,500 students worldwide – received the “Into Orbit” theme. They spent the next few months studying the real-world challenges of space and developing innovative solutions using science and technology. For more information about the competition, go here.
