ROYAL CITY — If they can raise the money, nine budding Royal City engineers will be headed to California next month.

The Royal Middle School robotics team, dubbed the Power Rangers, excelled both at the regional competition in Richland and the state competition in Spokane, bringing home the Champion Finalist Award said their robotics teacher and coach, Theresa Piper. Their next stop, they hope, will be the Western Edge Invitational, held May 12-14 in Long Beach, California.

The Power Rangers are part of the First Lego League, in which, as the name would suggest, all the robots are made using Legos. Teams compete in four areas. The first is designing, building and programming the robot itself, called Robot Performance.

“They have a set, like a giant mat, with a bunch of tasks that they can do for a certain amount of points,” Piper said. “And for every task – called a mission – they complete, they get a certain amount of points … You get two minutes to run as many missions as you can that you have pre-programmed.”

The second part of the challenge is Robot Design. Here students answer questions about their team’s robot and problem-solving methods.

The third phase of the competition involves real-world problems. This year’s theme was energy, and the Power Rangers rose to the occasion. They toured Wanapum Dam to learn about hydropower and spoke with current and retired dam workers. In the course of this, they learned that one problem dams face is oil leaking from turbines into the river. The students brainstormed ways to stop the leaks or alternatives to using oil.

“They settled on swapping to a hydro-lubrication system,” Piper said. “So a water-lubricated system instead of using oil altogether. And what was interesting is they came to that solution on their own, and people at the Chelan County PUD shared with us that Rocky Reach Dam is currently changing over to a completely hydro- or water-based lubrication system. So that is actually a solution that they're currently working on.”

The fourth part of the competition involves the league’s core values of discovery, innovation, impact, inclusion, teamwork and fun.

“That's one area I think our team is really strong in,” Piper said. Every month we do a community service project. Sometimes they're small, sometimes they're bigger. And we're a no-cut team; everybody's welcome. So that’s impact and inclusion. And then, by researching new ideas, and coming up with the solutions, we hit discovery and innovation. They work really well as a team, they try very hard to make sure everybody has their own job and is involved in all pieces of it. And they probably have too much fun sometimes. So lots of fun.”

The team originally qualified, through its showing in Spokane, to compete in Sydney, Australia, but the cost of that trip would have been prohibitive, Piper said. Instead, they asked to be put on the waiting list for the Western Edge Open and were accepted. Now it’s just a matter of finding the money to go, she said.

“With the cost of registration, hotel, airfare, food, and transformation we are looking at a lot of fundraising for our team of nine students,” she wrote in an email to the Herald. “A rough estimate for costs is $12,000.”

The team has won a couple of grants, Piper said, and has been selling popcorn and juice at school. They’ll also be selling roses at the Missoula Children’s Theater’s performance Friday. As of Tuesday night, the team had already raised somewhere in the neighborhood of $6,000, RMS Principal Dave Jaderlund said at the Tuesday Royal School Board meeting. Still, it’s a tight timeline, Piper wrote, and with the majority of Royal students living below the federal poverty line, the need for support from the community is great.

“These kids are really hard workers,” Piper said. “And we're just really excited to provide them with a new opportunity, to take them out of town. A lot of our kids don't necessarily get those opportunities when it comes to STEM especially. So we just want to provide as many opportunities as these kids can get, especially when they've earned them.”

Joel Martin can be reached via email at jmartin@columbiabasinherald.com.

Want to help out?

To support the Power Rangers robotics team, contact Theresa Piper at tpiper@royalisd.org.