MORGANTOWN — OK, so maybe Montevideo, Uruguay, isn’t quite as famous as its Argentine next-door neighbor, Buenos Aries.
However, the South American metropolis is known for its river beaches and laid-back lifestyle.
It’s the (shared) birthplace of the Tango, and it owns, all by itself, the heaping chivito — hailed as the “Mount Everest” of steak sandwiches.
Montevideo this week is also hosting a scary-smart collection of Monongalia County middle-schoolers.
Collectively, the students from St. Francis Central Catholic, North Elementary and Mountaineer Middle are known as the “Flaming Unidroids” LEGO robotics team, and they’re taking part in international competition there Tuesday through Saturday.
Sawyer Rudy, Eli DeBastiani, Wyatt Abbitt, Alex Ostien and August Owen are representing St. Francis.
Amari Knights is carrying the pennant of North Elementary and Michael Kritschgau rounds out the roster for Mountaineer Middle.
These aren’t the LEGOs you snapped together on Christmas morning, said Paul Kritschgau (Michael’s dad) who coaches the team with Trevor Rudy, the pop of Sawyer.
This is the First LEGO League — or, FLL, as the competitors know it — and to get to Uruguay the Unidroids had to build a robot, which was worked through a series of interstellar-type scenarios for matches carrying the theme, “Into Orbit.”
“It’s not a toy,” Kritschgau said. “They have to tell it what to do.”
Which means computer coding, he said. Twenty-five pages of code (or commands) for the gear ratios alone.
There was the robotic arm that (hopefully) placed the train car on a rail — in case, say, NASA ever decides to do some mining on Mars.
And the all-important docking with the lunar lander procedure, for those of you who remember watching the grainy Apollo missions on three-channel TV.
Once, they couldn’t get the robot of out of reverse.
“That was coming up with a lot of stuff,” Eli said, ruefully. “Then throwing a lot of stuff out.”
Gimbals. The aforementioned gear ratios. Even the effects of microgravity on the body’s collagen.
Given the international competition, the teasing the Unidroids deploy on each other is also world-class.
Which is OK, Sawyer said, so long as it doesn’t intrude on the work.
“We all get along,” he said. “And everybody has a job to do.”
JBissett@DominionPost.com
TWITTER @DominionPostWV.
