A team of students from four Fairfax County schools won the middle school technology division’s Create Award at the 2018 VEX IQ Challenge of the VEX Robotics World Championship. The Create Award is presented to the team whose robot design incorporates a creative engineering solution to the challenges of this year’s robot game that incorporates solid mechanical ability, unique design solutions and innovative approaches to the game play.

Team members are FCPS students David Han, Sophia Lee and Cynthia Wu of Cooper Middle; Pranav Anumandla of Longfellow Middle; Daniel Wu of Churchill Road Elementary and Samantha Li of Spring Hill Elementary. Team members worked for most of the school year to design, build and test their robot, and to conduct research on ethics in robotics. They earned two awards at the Virginia competition: the Excellence Award and the Teamwork Champion Award.