Woodlawn Middle School LEGO team ‘mooves’ to victory

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The Moovers, an all-girl, all-sixth-grade LEGO robotics team, won the FIRST LEGO League state tournament in January. | Ronnie Wachter~Sun-Times Media

Updated: March 17, 2012 8:12AM

After they won the regional championship, they tore up the playbook and started over — and then won the state championship.

Now, with the national championship looming in the spring, the Moovers are starting over again.

The Moovers are a group of sixth-grade girls attending Woodlawn Middle School, and they will represent Illinois as one of nation’s best LEGO robotics teams — in a field that is 85 percent boys.

Rebuilding their creation from the ground up means facing, and beating, the same problems as the first two times, but with better solutions. The current quandary: seafood is getting in their robot’s way.

“What are we stuck on?” Rachel McCoy asked her teammates while walking toward the playing field. “A fish? Bummer.”

The fish was actually a LEGO piece, and the Moovers’ robot is built from the same plastic bricks.

Special feeling

“It made me feel special,” said Moover Veonia Sobhy of defeating teams in the state final that were older and all-male. “A lot of girls don’t really do this. We had fun with it.”

“It made our team feel more motivated,” Katie Chiasson said of winning a trip to nationals. “It made us push harder.”

The Moovers won the FIRST LEGO League state tournament, held Jan. 21-22 in Arlington Heights. The team is looking at ways to improve their work before moving to the national competition, May 3-6 in Winter Haven, Fla.

At competition, judges grade each team in four categories. At state, the Moovers’ four combined scores were high enough to earn them the overall title, but none were high enough to satisfy coach Rhett Starr.

In particular, the Moovers’ score on its “missions,” the competition in which the teams program robots built out of LEGO pieces to perform a collection of tasks as they drive around a table, still has too many mistakes.

“Missions always need upgrading,” Starr said.

He and co-coaches Laurie Haas and Kevin O’Brien have tried to tighten up everything about the Moovers for three years. The club came together in 2009, when the Motorola Solutions Foundation gave a grant to Girl Scouts of Greater Chicago and Northwest Indiana, directing the Scouts to start 10 new FLL clubs. Some girls can fall behind boys in science and math once they reach high school, and the technology company saw the LEGO competition as a means to keep young ladies interested in those fields.

A handful of girls from Troop 671 heard about the new program.

“It just sounded really interesting, like something I wouldn’t normally do,” Alexandra Reuter said.

“I’m not the smartest kid in school, but here I can really shine,” Claire Haas added.

Each year, FLL teams build and program LEGO robots to perform a revolving variety of missions. Teams must also make a five-minute, multi-media presentation about that year’s technology-based theme. This year’s theme is food safety. In 2009, the topic was mass transportation, so the new girls from Troop 671 needed a team name.

“Moovers” got the point across. Spotted-cow manicures followed, and in 2012, at the club’s first state tournament, 63 teams that ranged in age from 9 to 14 fell to a crew of 11- and 12-year-old girls, who wore pom-pons in their hair.

Unexpected win

The crew’s scores were not particularly threatening in any of the four categories, either. Several Moovers said that, as the judges announced the winners of the sub-categories and never called their name, they assumed their first trip to state was just a building block.

“I was starting to get discouraged,” Allison Chen said. “The judge said, ‘You probably won’t win anything.’”

Upon hearing that, Anisha Rao said her mood soured.

“We were mopey monsters,” she confessed.

But when they heard their name as champion, everything changed.

“Everybody was just like ‘Wwhhhaaaaa!!’” Haas said. “And the parents were going crazy. Anisha’s mom was the one jumping so high.”

The victors will spend much of this winter and spring at their missions table, tweaking their robot and sharpening their presentation. After nationals, the American high school champions have the right to attend the international tournament, facing 43 other nations. Unfortunately, the team is too young for an opportunity for that competition.

Even if they come home empty-handed, the team said they would still have much to be proud of. Not just any group of 11- and 12-year-old girls can “Moove” squads of 14-year-old boys out of their way.

“If I lose everything else in the rest of my life, I don’t care,” Rao said, “because I won this.”