West Newbury Students Win International Robotics Championship

CAMBRIDGE (CBS) - They are worldwide robotics champs from the small town of West Newbury, and they're only in elementary school. They call themselves the Code Crackers and they were grand prize winners of the Wonder League Robotics Competition.

On Thursday, the team from West Newbury had the field trip of their young lives as they got to tour MIT's Media Lab on Thursday as a bonus for winning.

Aiden Johnson, Riley Cammett, Charlie Botto and Tommy Rich were wide eyed.

"I thought it was amazing," Riley said.

"It was great because I got to see all the robotic things," Aiden added.

They worked on their project for eight months, and it didn't always go well. In fact, they tried 27 different ways to have their robot capture several ping pong balls, and 22 of them didn't work.

"Succeeding does not teach you everything. Failing teaches you more than succeeding," said Charlie Botto.

And that means this foursome learned a lot. They had to write the code to tell the robot what to do, they kept records and drawings showing their progress and they had to keep at it.

Finally, their robot grabbed all the balls, climbed a ramp and dropped the balls into a cup. The Code Crackers project won the international competition for their age group against 7,000 other teams.

"Our goal was to get as many points as we could so we could win. Which we did," said Riley proudly.

"I really liked it. We got to work together so much," said Tommy.

The team won $5000. Five hundred dollars for each teammate and $3000 for their school. Their teacher and coach Hillary Seager deserves a big congratulations as well.