Team Elements, which is comprised of students from Barrington Middle School, recently won the first place Champions Award and first place in the "Robot Performance" category at a First LEGO League Rhode Island qualifying tournament at the Gordon School.

The first place Champion's Award is the major award given to the team with the top overall performance in all judged areas (Core Values, Robot Game & Design and the Innovation Project), while the first place award in "Robot Performance" is given to the top scoring team in the robot game competition.

Next up for Team Elements will be a trip to the FLL State Championship, which is being held at Roger Williams University on Saturday, Jan. 11. 

Team Elements is a family/community team that features Neal Bansal, Harrison Barakos, Jonathan Currie, Jacob Dickstein, Nithya Guduru, Theja Guduru, Piper Kirkson, Landon Montecalvo and Dan Nguyen. Three parents of team members coach the group.

In the First LEGO League, teams design, build, and program LEGO Education MINDSTORMS EV3 robots to perform autonomous "missions" on a themed playing field and design innovative solutions to a real-world problem inspired by the theme. This year's theme was "City Shapers." 

In addition to the robotics component, the team had to identify a specific challenge related to urban planning to shape an optimal future for cities and create an innovative solution to address the problem. Team Elements chose to focus on urban farming and mental health. The team consulted with various experts from the Barrington Farm School, in addition to a naturopathic doctor, psychiatrist and civil engineer for their project.