Students take top honors during Mars rover competition

The Hacker Middle School Mars Rover Challenge teams work to rebuild their Lego rovers.

For the second straight year, a team of students from Hacker Middle School won top honors during a robotics competition held earlier this month in Twin Falls.

The middle school sent two teams to this year's Mars Rover Challenge held April 12 at the College of Southern Idaho. They faced 17 teams representing fifth and sixth grade students from across the state.

Local students selected for the competition are part of the school district's gifted and talented program. To prepare for the event, both middle school teams designed and built robotic rovers using nothing more than Lego building blocks and components.

Members from both teams spent three months preparing for the yearly robotics competition. Each week, they met to iron out their designs while developing briefings they presented during the competition.

As part of the learning process, the students learned about different design pros and cons associated with their made-from-scratch robots. While they had an unlimited number of parts to work with, finding the right combination of speed and power was tougher than they expected, said Cailin Coggins, one of five students on the middle school's sixth grade squad.

"You actually have challenges you have to put (the rover) through," Coggins said.

The challenges featured in the yearly competition included a hill climb, blind drive, a rock pick up and speed test. Along with the rover events, teams had to present their findings to a panel of engineering students, who judged them on teamwork and how well they demonstrated the engineering process.

However, their biggest hurdle during the competition dealt with the building a rig that could scoop up rocks.

According to Gabe Vogt, from the fifth grade team, the rover had to do the job without being too front heavy, which would've caused it to fall over as it rolled up an inclined ramp.

While the ramp started off at a modest 20 degrees, it eventually reached a more daunting 60 degrees, said Brianna Todd with the sixth grade team.

The five students on Hacker's sixth grade squad earned one of the top scores for poster designs during this year's event while posting a solid rating during the all-around showing.

However, it was the fifth graders that earned top honors this year, bringing home the overall championship title. Meanwhile, they claimed two individual event trophies for building the fastest rover while posting a perfect score of the day during the blind drive.

The fifth grade team admitted they entered the competition as the underdogs.

"We were the fifth graders, and no one expected us to win," Oam Patel said.

"It was a miracle," Gabi Jausoro added.