Three robotics teams from Lyons Middle Senior High School earned their way to the Colorado VEX IQ State Championship, which is an impressive achievement for a school its size. The success of Lyons’ robotics teams can be attributed to the school’s supportive environment, where students are encouraged to explore STEM fields and be innovative.
“Not the Golden Girls,” an all-female robotics team consisting of seventh-grader Rose Murdock and eighth graders Maddie Denney and Kinsley Romero, proudly represented Lyons at the state championship. During the competition, they overcame a variety of hurdles and had to refine their robot, specifically focusing on their intake system, which plays an important role in scoring points during the game. Despite facing coding glitches and unexpected challenges, the students remained determined and resourceful, constantly tweaking their strategies to improve their robot’s performance. “There are coding parts in the competition where we showcase our coding, and it didn’t work,” shared Maddie. “We only get three tries to do it, and the first two tries, the coding either kept glitching or something was broken, so that was a bit stressful. We eventually got it to work, which was a relief.”
One exciting moment for the team was winning the Judges Award, which recognizes excellence in robot design as well as overall team behavior. “During the competition, two judges conducted a 10-minute interview where they asked us questions about both our robot and our experience with VEX IQ,” Rose explained. “Teams from different schools collaborate in the competition, and they want to ensure we’re working well together and everyone is having fun.” Maddie added, “The moment when our team’s name was called was pretty amazing. We were looking at each other for reassurance. Did they actually call our name? Did we mishear it? Was it a misprint? Did we actually win?”
When asked what they enjoyed most about this year’s robotics season, Maddie shared, “I really like the coding aspect of it because I like that I can control the robot directly.” For Kinsley, it was the community. “It’s my first year in robotics, so I came in brand new and unsure of what was happening with coding and building. Having both of my teammates, as well as everyone else on the Lyons robotics team, help me was wonderful. I was able to gain a lot of wisdom from them, and it’s been a very welcoming environment from the beginning.” Rose shared Kinsley’s sentiment, stating, “There are two things I enjoyed most, the first one is the community, because we’re all friends who like to build really fun robots. My second thing is that I really like the days where we just sit and acknowledge a problem and find a solution for it.”
Teacher Shannon Carheden, who has been coaching robotics at Lyons for two years, is impressed by the accomplishments of each of the Lyons robotics teams. “All of VEX is student-designed and student-led, so we had very different robots among our teams,” said Carheden. She believes some of the most valuable lessons students gained from competing in robotics are a “growth mindset, having to look at something and work on it multiple times, not giving up, and always coming back to the initial problem and asking, ‘What can we do better and how can we fix this?’”
Preparation for the state competition involved regular practice sessions twice a week for two hours. “One of the unique things about our program is that I don’t have any students who don’t participate in another extracurricular activity,” said Carheden. “In addition to robotics, Kinsley is on the volleyball and cross country teams, and there were four wrestlers on the all-boys robotics team that made it to state. It’s been great to see all of them excel in multiple activities. We’re really proud of that.”