Announcing the Winners of the 2021-22 Wonder League Robotics Competition
Check out our sizzle reel with highlights from this year's competitors!
We are so thrilled to be announcing this year’s top finishers in the Wonder League Robotics Competition Innovator Cup and Pioneer Cup.
A huge thanks go out to the teams and coaches who brought creativity and grit to their work on this year’s missions.
Our theme this year was Innovation and we shined a spotlight on 5 inventions that have had a huge impact on our lives.
The missions featured the following inventors:
- Harold Smith and Edward Binney, inventors of the Crayon
- Katherine Johnson, mathematician who calculated trajectories for the Mercury and Apollo missions (and beyond)
- Samual Morse, inventor of Morse Code (hello! Dash & Dot!)
- George Devol, inventor of the first industrial robot (it was named Unimate)
- Nancy Johnson, inventor of the first hand-cranked ice cream maker!
The Missions took teams on a tour through time and space to visit these inventors and help them solve problems.
And that’s why we named two of our divisions, the Innovator Cup and the Pioneer Cup.
At Wonder Workshop, it is our aim to help young people become tomorrow’s innovators and based on what we observed in this year’s submissions, innovators they are already!
And now to our winners! Our judges rewarded innovation when they saw it giving extra consideration when teams approached the Missions in an out-of-the-box way. And this year’s winning team in the 6-8 year old bracket. The winner of the Innovator Cup is, drumroll please….
Team Owl Robots!
Team Owl Robots are an all-girls team from the US with Coach Heather Seager at the helm.
This team went above and beyond for this year’s final mission. They carefully crafted their contraption, and made sure the judges could follow their presentation and logbooks. They earned extra points for their beautiful set design and design elements. It was a great example of the design-thinking process in action.
These creative youngsters came up with an effective and creative attachment that utilized a lasso on a pole system to grab each inventor individually and bring them back through the portal. Precise aiming and creative coding were essential. The team shared with us a fun and engaging story and made sure they didn’t let anything go to waste with their community tools. This team definitely stood out to all of our judges. Congratulations Team Owl Robots. Awesome inventing!
Now for this year’s Pioneer Cup Winners. This is our competition for the 9-12 year old age bracket. And the winner is…
Team Chameleon Crew
Team Chameleon Crew is a boy and girl duo from the US, with coach Andrea Smith leading them. They had some very close competition this year, but their engineered solution really stood out from the rest. They were able to use Dash’s drive train, or wheels, on a treadmill like contraption to control a magnetic mechanism that moved up and down a ramp, picking up each inventor individually along the way. What an awesome way to use Dash’s wheels! This team’s news broadcast journey shared their story like we were right there with them. They had a well-designed coding solution, but it was their engineering skills that really put them ahead of the rest.
I would keep my eye on this team in the future … they, along with so many other teams, have a very bright future in STEAM!
