On Nov.9, Coach Lane Crosby packed her car with nine students, drove to Carolina Forest and had her students competed in the Grand Strand Qualifying Tournament, a competition apart of South Carolina first LEGO league.

The league holds these competitions to support the development of students with interest in engineering and science through STEM and robotics activities.

After months of hard work and practice, the Georgetown School of Arts & Science Robotics Team were ready to show-off their skills as they competed in their first competition of the year.

At Ten Oaks Middle School, teams displayed their research and demonstrate their Core Values at the 2019 League City Shaper.

Core Values that included discovery, teamwork, fairness, integrity, innovation, respect, impact, cooperation and mostly importantly fun.

Each team was given a challenge this year in order for them to demonstrate their unique innovation skill with LEGO robotics.

This years challenge was to create a robot that could help a blind person shop for groceries around the store.

Georgetowns team, named the Angry Nerds, students spoke with Food Lion employees, robotics experts Brian Anderson and people with visual impairments who shop at Food Lion to find the best solution to the problem.

What they came up with was a technologically solution, to put object detection devices on the front of grocery carts and create a map of the store on an existing app.

Coach Crosby helped navigate the kids research as they not only had to make and program the robot but make sure the missions were successful.

They had to design a robot and program the robot and thats was the third area. In the fourth area, they have to run the missions on this board Crosby said referring to the robotics board. In the championship, the team has to score a certain amount of points to be considered to move onward in the championship. She says that coaches arent with them as they present their project to judges and how they design and use it and answer judges questions. Six of the nine students were rookies but Crosby said they quickly got the hang of things. She said that the setting is different in most classrooms in which most of the students had to use STEM and teamwork to solve a problem.

I am really proud of these guys Crosby said Theyve really learned a lot in a short period of time and Im really thrilled the way they work together as a team.

Not only did they build the device but also shared their idea with the manager of Food Lion, two people with visual impairments and the SC Commission for the blind. Annika, one of the middle schoolers, help build the teams robot as part of the programming team.

We did good on a lot of things,Annika recalled But our robot was kind of acting up a bit. It was definitely a fun experience.

Crosby is proud of her students balance of the project, robot design, robot game and core values.

Although they did not win the champions award, Angry Nerds took home the Core Values Award giving them enough points to qualify for the state competition.

The team will be moving forward to the SC East State Regional competition at Cane Bay High School on December 14.

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'Angry Nerds' help the blind shop in robotics competition - South Strand news