MOSES LAKE - The next Washington FIRST Lego League state champion could be a team from Moses Lake or Warden.

Moses Lake's RoboNerdz and Warden's Ductape Overload both fared well enough at the league's Eastern Washington semifinals Saturday to earn them a spot at this weekend's state championship event.

The RoboNerdz and Ductape Overload were two of four Basin teams that competed this past weekend. Moses Lake teams RoboSparx and RoboStormz also participated in the semifinals event.

Ductape Overload also placed first in the competition's Core Values: Teamwork category. The RoboSparx took home a first place Core Values: Gracious Professionalism award this year.

The four Basin teams competed against 32 other Central and Eastern Washington robotics teams at Chief Moses Middle School. They earned their spots in the semifinals during the league's Eastern Washington regional competition held in Ellensburg earlier this month.

The Lego League state championship takes place this Saturday at Central Washington University.

Kat Stebbins, Camp Fire Moses Lake FIRST Robotics coordinator, said this isn't the first time a Moses Lake team has advanced to the state championship round.

"The last five years we've had at least one team go on to state each year," she said.

RoboSparx were the league's regional champions last year and the RoboGirls (who are now the RoboNerdz) won a programming award and had a high score during the robot performance portion of the regional competition last year, Stebbins said. RoboSparx didn't bring anything home from states last year, but the RoboGirls won a Core Values award during the event, she said.

This is the RoboStormz' rookie year.

Ductape Overload coach Gail Hardman, of Warden Middle School, said this is the team's third year of competing. The team of eight are all currently eighth-graders at the middle school, she said.

Hardman, who was in New York for the semifinals, said she was proud of her team for advancing to the state championship. Team members and Warden High School science teacher Darin Orton, who filled in for Hardman Saturday, delivered the good news after the competition.

"They're such a great group of kids, and it was good to see their hard work pay off," Hardman said. She said she'll return to the area in time to take her team to the state competition.

Stebbins said that although RoboNerdz is the only Moses Lake team advancing to state, each of the teams should be proud of making it all the way to semifinals.

"This season, the kids each put in at least 150 hours of work," she said. "That's a lot of dedication at age nine to put that many hours into something."

The 150 hours includes time spent programming their robots and coming up with a solution to this season's "challenge."

This year, competitors were asked to find solutions to a natural disaster.

One team explored how temporary lasers can replace down power lines and one team figured out that RFID (radio frequency identification) chips can be used for emergency vehicles to find addresses better than GPS, Stebbins said. Another team looked at how pipelines get exposed after wildfires, she said.

"They all did their research, talked with experts and consulted various resources," Stebbins said.

And programming their robots for the robot performance portion of the event is no easy task either, she said,

"Most people don't realize how much math is involved and how precise you have to be," Stebbins said.

The robots are all pre-programmed, as competitors don't use remote controls to move them around the game table.

"Every step the robot makes, every time a wheel turns, that's all programmed beforehand," Stebbins said. "The kids are very proud of their work and their coaches and I are always extremely proud of them."