Miraleste Host Robotics Tournament
• Miraleste Intermediate School host annual VEX Robotics Tournament last week.
Participants of VEX Robotics had another successful day on Saturday, Feb. 1, in a VEX Robotics Competition called Tower Takeover.
The event lasted from 8 in the morning to 4 in the afternoon in Miraleste Intermediate School’s gym. With 34 teams and 200 competitors from across Los Angeles participating, the gym was packed with excitement, technology, and artificial intelligence.
The teams compete in seven matches and get ranked based on their resulting scores.
The first-place team consisted of members from the Science Academy who had a strong robot and a consistent track record with competing.
The second-place team was from Washington Irving Middle School in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
The third-place team was from Miraleste Middle School, where the head of the program, Campbell Nimick, teaches and instructs the school’s robotics teams.
Nimick has been running the program for the past eight years and works to provide students with experience in the STEM field as well as life lessons that students can take with them to high school and beyond.
Because many students go into high school without any interest or passion in a certain field, Nimick wants to provide a program that gives insight into the professional and technological field of STEM and give participants a springboard into a possible career path.
Additionally, he hopes to teach skills on collaboration, camaraderie, and leadership through VEX Robotics.
“I want to expose these students to the reality of STEM in case it sparks any interest in pursuing the field in the future,” Nimick said. “Through the teams, the kids are essentially forced to work with people. We want to teach our kids lessons they would not learn in the classroom, things that would help them become better workers, professionals, and team players.”
