PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) -- It’s only February, and already the robotics team at the Academy at Palumbo High School in South Philadelphia is having a historic year, with a title that has beaten their coronavirus pandemic blues.
The Robogriffins won the CoderZ Pro League world championship in January, besting a team from a school in Moscow, Russia.
"The CoderZ challenge is one of several projects that we’ve been working with the students on over the past year," said Lee Burwasser a physics teacher and robotics coach at the school. "We have had to come up with 500 new ways to teach a robotics class."
Students had to program a simulated robot and, eventually in the playoffs, play their code head to head against another team.
"Essentially the challenge was, first, to learn how to code. Then students had to program robots to navigate a course by themselves. The culmination of the challenge was for a robot programmed by one school and a robot programmed by another school to compete on a virtual playing field, where they essentially partook in target practice," Burwasser said.
The team gathered via Google Meet to watch the final rounds together as they were streamed live from the CoderZ broadcast studio in Israel. Co-captain and lead programmer Mingjin Lu said he was ecstatic when his Robogriffins won.
"I'm really happy that we [had] a chance to win this world championship title. This is actually the first world championship our school had," he said.
Lu, an 11th grade student at Palumbo, was humble about the win.
"I'm very thankful to my teammates and the robotics club. A lot of ideas are actually from my teammates. Me, I just acted as a captain," he said.
Lu moved to Philly from Shanghai about 6 years ago. He says English isn’t his first language and that he learned to code less than 2 years ago.
"This winning of the championship really sparks my life, my teammates' life, our teachers' life," he said. "We have this dull feeling and bad feeling this pandemic period, and so we are all very happy that we can win this."
Burwasser agreed, saying Lu and the Robogriffins have made their teachers and the school proud in challenging times.
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"Not only did the students take to the program lessons, but also to excel at the programming is really absolutely one of the highlights of this year and coaching robotics since I began 4 years ago," Burwasser said.
Lu says his family is still in disbelief that he’s an international champion and that he’s planning for a future in engineering.
"What I learned the most was from this coder challenge. A lot of engineering experience I have is actually from this program," Lu said.
The CoderZ Pro League challenge, which launched in the fall, was funded through the Philadelphia Robotics Coalition, a nonprofit organization that brings STEM and coding access to public school students and supports competitive robotics programs. It funds coach stipends, workshops, events and mentorship programs to make it possible for schools to create and sustain their own robotics programs.
Burwasser says the Robogriffins' success would not have been possible without it.