Schools
Heritage Middle School's Dancing Ducks Compete at 2012 FIRST LEGO League Championships
The team gathered four top-ten placements and took home a trophy for their work outside the competition.
The Heritage Middle School “Dancing Ducks” competed last Saturday in the 2012 Boston Scientific MN FIRST LEGO League State Championships in St. Paul.
The Dancing Ducks placed seventh or higher in four out of five categories against 42 other Division 1 teams (grades 4, 5 and 6) from throughout the state. Logan Finkel, Bryson Halsey, Aiden Jacobs, Jacob Kinney and Peter Dean McKenzie—all fifth graders—competed with a robot they built, programmed and adapted to a series of competition scenarios. The team also completed a research project on food safety that they presented to judges.
The team is coached by Susan Jerabek and Doug Kinney.
Find out what's happening in Mendota Heightswith free, real-time updates from Patch.
“It was really good collaborative work,” said Jerabek. “As a team, they work really well together.”
In addition to the team’s scores, the team won the "Outstanding Award for Gracious Professionalism" for helping Moreland and teams gain experience earlier in the season. The Dancing Ducks set up a scrimmage in November for the younger students. They guided Q&A sessions and ran drills to prepare the elementary teams for competition.
Find out what's happening in Mendota Heightswith free, real-time updates from Patch.
To reach the championships, the Dancing Ducks had to first excel in regional competitions, which drew hundreds of teams to participate.
The research project element of the competition gave students a chance to learn more about food safety and contamination. The team researched temperature sensitive ink and papers to develop a label that would display the “Mr. Yuk” symbol if exposed to temperatures above 41° Fahrenheit.
Jerabek said the kids interviewed the manager of the Rainbow Foods in West St. Paul and learned more about meat packaging, storage and transportation. The team also visited the corporate headquarters of Kowalski's in Woodbury to learn about food safety in the industry.
Their placements in the championship put them in the top five percent of teams in the state, according to the Dancing Ducks LEGO League blog.
Robot Programming: 4th place
Robot Design: 4th place
Core Values: 6th place
Project: 7th place
Robot Performance: 39th place
Get more local news delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for free Patch newsletters and alerts.