The Rye Middle School’s new robotics team won first place honors for website development at the First Lego League Championships in the Hudson Valley, held on Feb. 10 at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.
Team RyeBotics, as the school’s team is known, won a first-place trophy in the Innovation Project in the Hudson Valley part of the competition for its design of a website intended to help visually impaired users get better access to sports and recreation activities. In another part of the 24-team tournament, Team RyeBotics had to design a robot made of Legos that navigated a game board and completed tasks along the way.
Team RyeBotics qualified for the RPI competition by finishing fifth out of 14 teams – made up of students ages 9 to 16 – at a previous qualifying tournament.
The middle school team is only two years old, created in 2022 after the school polled students and found a strong interest in non-sports-related competition. That prompted the creation of the robotics team, with guidance from engineering teacher and current team coach Susan Granata.