By By ERIN VER BERKMOES / Niles Daily Star
NILES - Countless hours fine-tuning things and working together as a team has paid off for seven students from the Home School Hub in Niles, who are participating in Lego Robotics contests.
At a recent competition in Holland, the students took home two trophies - one for innovative solutions to building things and programs and the other for teamwork.
The team will be traveling to Notre Dame on Sunday, Dec. 4, for a competition and then on Dec. 10 to Novi to compete in the Michigan state competition.
The group of students must create a robot out of Legos. That robot must perform a series of seven tasks in just two and a half minutes.
The team is coached by Meg Edwards of Niles, whose daughter Laura is on the team.
Team members include Laura Edwards, Elly Ericson, Zac Ericson, Anders Ericson, Tara Joyce, Logan Runyon and Preston Huffman.
The theme for the robotics contest changes each year and this year, contest officials chose an underwater theme.
Laura's favorite part of working on the robotics project is the programming.
It takes the students many tries to get the robot to perform the tasks of the competition. The robot has to be programmed and then tested. If the task isn't performed properly, then the program must be tweaked until it's right.
Preston Huffman's favorite part of the robotics contest is to work on building the competition robot.