Members of the Hill Country Middle School team won first place overall in the FIRST Lego Texas Champions Competition at Rouse High School in Leander on Dec. 12, earning the team a ticket to the FIRST Lego League World Festival in Atlanta April 15-17.

The four eighth-grade members of the HCMS team, Peter Driscoll, Garrison Hefter, Joshua Rothfus and Akash Thaker, beat out members of more than 50 other Texas teams for the honor. They will compete with 64 other teams from 29 countries in the World Competition in April.

Members of the Cedar Creek Elementary School team also won top honors in the state competition. Grayson Seidel, Brent Bauries, Nick Hummel and Luke Sang brought home a first-place award for robotic performance and a second-place award for robot design.

“Two years ago, Chap Robotics won the Rookie Award at the Lone Star Regional in Houston,” said Ray Almgren, vice president, developer and academic relations for National Instruments, a sponsor of the district’s robotics program. “Now Chap robotics is one of the best FIRST teams in Central Texas. And with the success of the FIRST Lego League teams from West Ridge and Hill Country, Chap robotics will get better and better.”

Westlake High School robotics head Norman Morgan said he thinks the success of the younger elementary and middle school students in robotics competitions like the FIRST Lego events will foster even more interest in the popular high school program.

“I hope it will lead to students coming into the program with experiences they can apply to our class and contest,” he said. “The hope of all these programs is to excite and inform students about the possibilities of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.”

Each year, the FIRST Lego competitive events around the world focus on science challenges that require students to design and program Lego robots to complete specific tasks. This year, the robotics challenges were focused on transportation.

Robotics events give students a chance to use the muscles between their ears, Almgren said.

“FIRST will someday become as popular a sporting event as basketball and baseball,” he said. “And I’m sure Westlake, like [in] all its other programs, will be best in class. But, unlike so many other sports, FIRST is the only sport I know of in which every student can go pro.”