La Jolla students on local robotics team eye international prize after regional win

With a regional title under its belt, a robotics team including two La Jolla students is preparing to represent Southern California in an international challenge this spring.

Team captain Chris Zheng, an eighth-grader at The Bishop’s School in La Jolla, said winning the California Southern First Lego League Challenge championship for ages 9-16 on Dec. 17 at UC Riverside means the team will advance to the First Championship international event April 19-22 in Houston.

Chris said the team, called CART (cooperation, art, responsibility, technology), beat out 500 other teams at the regional competition.

CART was founded three years ago with neighborhood friends and classmates who shared an interest in robotics and coding. Along with Chris, CART members include Derek Kang, Tejas Karthik, Alex Tang, Vishwas Tattala and Kayley Xu.

The CART team was founded three years ago with neighborhood friends and classmates who shared an interest in robotics and coding.

(Ken Zhong)

To win the regional competition, Chris said, the team had to score well in four sections: core values, or exemplifying qualities such as teamwork and discovery; an innovation project addressing a team-identified problem; robot games, in which teams use Lego Technic pieces to build and program a robot to complete missions; and robot design, which is presented to judges.

Kayley, also an eighth-grader at Bishop’s, is the co-director with Chris of robot design for the team. Members chose to address energy sources for their innovation project, and each member came up with possible solutions, she said.

CART’s project incorporated many ideas, from hydropower to solar and wind energy, discussing the efficiency of each.

During the robot games, CART designed attachments for its robot to complete missions, Kayley said.

“One of our goals was to make each attachment be able to multitask so it would be more efficient and we wouldn’t have to change the attachment as often,” she said.

Kayley said there aren’t many guidelines for robot design, only that it must be made of Legos.

The international contest in April will have similar components.

To prepare for competitions, CART meets weekly at Chris’ house to work on designs.

After watching YouTube videos of robots of other teams in the international contest, “we’re actually completely redesigning the robot,” Chris said.

“They’re very competitive,” he said, “so we want to revamp a little and basically add more features that allow us to complete all the missions on time.”

Team members’ parents function as coaches and mentors when needed.

Kayley, the only girl on the team, said girls in robotics are rare but “it doesn’t change anything.”

CART members taught two summer classes for First Lego League in August, she added, and she led one of those, an introductory class for girls called “Girls Who Build: Robotics.”

“It was pretty fun,” Kayley said. “It was cool encouraging [the girls] to get into STEM [science, technology, engineering, math].”

She said she’s been interested in engineering for years. “I like how in robotics you can build [something] and I like how it’s fun and challenging.”

CART is Kayley’s second robotics team; the first, in a younger division of FLL, disbanded after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Chris said he got into robotics five years ago at the same program that CART taught in last summer.

He teamed with fellow Bishop’s student Ethan Sun and Francis Parker School student Steve Zhang on Dec. 5 to win the Aerospace Robotics National Tello Competition in the beginner category. They programmed a Tello drone to pop specific balloons on a wall of mounted balloons using a skewer strapped to the drone.

Chris said he loves robotics for its self-improvement aspect. “There’s always a way to improve your design and get better results. … You don’t stop.” ◆