By Amanda Duan, Belmont Voice correspondent
Christmas lights glowed across the wooden floor of First LEGO League Robotics Team Head Coach Sterling Crockett’s living room, where five members of the Cyber Guardians of Huntrix gathered recently for a post-competition ice cream party. The kids leaned toward one another, bowls in their laps, ready to talk about their first season in LEGO robotics.
Fourth-grader Adelaide Riegle described a turning point that came after weeks of trial. She had spent an entire practice session trying to make the team’s robot rotate exactly 90 degrees.
“When I finally got it to turn right to exactly 90 degrees — not 89, not 91 — it felt like one of the biggest achievements for me, personally,” she said.
The Cyber Guardians, known in competition as Team 6044, wrapped up their debut season at a Dec. 6 First LEGO League qualifier in Northborough. The team earned 175 points and received a robot design award. For their coaches, the season’s meaning came from the steady confidence and skill the children built along the way.
“So much of engineering has to do with how much time you actually spend trying and failing, failing again and trying again,” Crockett said.
Progress came through repetition. He described the work as often feeling like repeating the same motions, making small adjustments until the robot finally behaves the way it should.
For three months, the group met twice a week, dividing its time between robot-building and a research project tied to this year’s archaeology theme. The project work took them outside the robotics room. Students interviewed an MIT archaeologist about challenges at a dig site in Guatemala and began sketching out ideas that might help address those challenges.
In robotics sessions, Crockett said much of the work involved returning to the table to see what needed adjusting, whether it was a drifting turn or a small line of code. Some tasks required such precise alignment that a slight misstep could undo an entire run. One student explained that if the robot was slightly misaligned, “it will dump the artifacts, and the support structures will fall down.” Students learned quickly that a mission could hinge on a fraction of a degree.
Fourth-grader Asher Yates said his own mission took weeks to unravel.
“It took about half of the classes for me to figure out the solution for even lifting this thingy that would push on my part,” he said. “Then I had to do all the coding to get there, and then I had to replace all my code. It was just a huge process.”
During the qualifier, the team completed seven runs. Crockett said the children were steadier each time.
“Every round they got a little bit better. They were a little more careful, a little more exact, a little more successful. And they never got flustered,” Crockett said.
Project Coach Taylor Yates said the students held on even as the pace intensified.
“It’s really overwhelming and intense, and it’s fast,” he said. “And they kept their heads on straight and made a couple of adjustments that ended up getting them a pretty high score.”
Their highest-scoring run during the competition carried students through missions they had spent months practicing, a quiet echo of all the afternoons they spent crouched over LEGO pieces and laptops. Each successful movement reflected dozens of earlier attempts made back in Belmont.
“We learned a lot about working as a team,” Asher said. “It was challenging, but it was really fun.”
Belmont’s robotics community continues to grow. Coaches said local teams often stop by one another’s practice sessions or join small mock meets, trading ideas about robot design and watching how other groups navigate the same challenges. Even brief visits, they said, give younger teams a clearer sense of what is possible and help them strengthen their own approaches.
All five team members say they plan to return. Crockett said each season builds upon the last.
“The more years they stay in the program, the more likely they are to find success,” he said. “And every year they continue learning skills that are more and more like what we do in engineering, product management and entrepreneurship.”
The ice cream bowls slowly emptied as the children leaned closer on the couch, the Christmas lights flickering behind them. They were no longer just first-time competitors recounting a season. They looked like a team ready for their next challenge.