Eighth-graders Pietro Maloney, left, and Zach Shetron, Freeport Middle School robotics class students, were part of a team that won the design award at a robotics competition at La Roche College. The entire class of 20 had been building and refining the robot since the school year began.

FREEPORT — A team of seventh- and eighth-graders from Freeport Middle School combined computer coding and Lego blocks into a robot that took first place for its mechanical design at a competition earlier this month at LaRoche College in McCandless Township, Allegheny County.

Mark Dempster, the teacher of a robotics class and seven of his students in that class traveled to LaRoche Jan. 6 for the first of two days of competition against 33 other teams in the scholastic division.

The entire class of 20 has been building and refining the robot since the school year began, Dempster said.

The middle-schoolers' task was to build an autonomous robot that was able to move around a tabletop course and complete tasks such as moving blocks or raising and lowering objects.

Dempster said, “On Friday they presented their robot design and software. Then on Saturday they used the robot to complete missions, as many missions as they could in two and a half minutes.”

In between the robot's sessions on the tabletop, the Freeport Middle School team would remove or add components to the 10-by-10-by-8 inch battery-powered robot made out of Lego blocks and a EV3 memory brick.

“There were 30 teams spread out in the gym. It was pretty noisy,” said Pietro Maloney, an eighth-grader from Sarver.

The hardest part for the team, Maloney said, was “probably making sure all the programs were correct in what we needed to do.”

Computer programs governing the robot's actions were downloaded to the unit.

“There was one time when it froze and just shut down,” said Maloney. “We were able to get it going again in that round, but we didn't get as many points as you could have had.”

His teammate Zach Shetron of Sarver said the hardest part of the competition was lining the robot in the exact same spot at the start of each session.

“Having to be that accurate every single time was kind of a challenge,” Shetron said.

Shetron said he hopes to build on his robotic expertise in the future.

“I want to make anything as robotic as possible,” Shetron said. “It would cut down on people going into steel mills.”

“Robots would cut down on industrial accidents and death. With robots on the floor, you don't have any accident reports,” he said.

“They designed the hardware that would accomplish these tasks,” Dempster said.

The Freeport team, which won the design award, received a trophy made out of Legos.