A large group of Kingfisher Middle School students - and a few teachers - took on a new “challenge” this year...

As in the Challenge division of the FIRST LEGO League, a competition designed to inspire youth to experiment and grow their critical thinking, coding, and design skills through hands-on STEM learning and robotics.

Kingfisher’s robotics teams had been working four days a week for more than two months and put their work to the test Nov. 13 in a competition at Francis Tuttle Technology Center in Oklahoma City.

“They may not have won, but each one had a great time and learned so much,” said Terry Willis, one of the directors of Kingfisher’s STARS program.

For the competition, students had to come up with a solution to a real-world shipping program and create a presentation of that solution.

More specifically, robotics teams had two-and-a-half minutes to run different missions on their table.

There were 16 missions, each worth different amounts of points based on difficulty.

Teams were given three attempts at the table and then they kept their best score.

To prepare, “we spent hours running code to get the robot just right to complete as many missions as possible in that time frame,” said Melody Kuehn, a KMS science teacher who coached the teams along with Kurt Kaya, a technology education teacher at the school.

The KMS robotics teams first needed a regulation-sized table.

Kuehn said that was constructed by Charles Walker “free of charge out of the kindness of his heart.”

Walker is a member of Kingfisher’s board of education.

The teams have been practicing since school began during STARS, the district’s after-school program.

“They learned about teamwork, computer coding, reading instructions to assemble many different Lego designs, problem/solution on building their own robot for the table game and had fun,” Willis said.

KMS sent two robotics teams to the competition.

The MVBees consisted of Kollin Lambert, Shaun Tougas, Mateo Arita, Easton Price, Noah Clayton, Jackson Garrett, Kevyn Aguinaga and Nitos DeLaTorre.

Members of the Shipping Shockers were Abby Wallace, Melissa Bollenbach, Petyn Theissen, Jacob Reed, Will Finley, Ryan Scammahorn, Brantley Johnson, Maddux Gomez and Finley Harrison.

“Both teams did progressively better with each attempt and learned a bit more each time to get more points,” Kuehn said.

She added this year’s competition - much like a single Lego - was a building block toward the future.

“Kurt and I were very proud of them. It was a new experience for all of us and we learned a lot to take into next year,” Kuehn said.

“Almost all the kids said they want to come back and be on the team next year. We will know more of what to expect and I fully believe we will make it to the state championship next year.”