The Cardinal STEM Academy program with Green Valley Elementary went to East Tennessee University this past Saturday and competed against schools from Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia and South Carolina and showed incredible success.
“They crushed it,” Green Valley Elementary teacher Meg Swecker said. “We were really just going with the expectation that we were going to have fun and learn how to compete.”
The team, made up of Green Valley fifth graders, wracked up a number of achievements.
Three out of four teams made the quarterfinals, and one team advanced to the finals competition. They also won the rookie award for best overall new team, autonomous award for best coding and second place overall.
“They get there, they start all of their coding and then they are troubleshooting on the fly, fix[ing] things and then the next round said we need to do this this and this,” Green Valley Elementary teacher Kelley Cook said. “Just watching them go through all of the critical thinking and all of those steps was amazing.”
There was an element of the unknown throughout the competition as sometimes the technology wouldn’t do what the students wanted it to do.
“You never know if it will work because sometimes if it does a flip and it’s below a 50% then it doesn’t do the flip,” fifth-grader Finley Wray said. “so you never know if it’s going to do the flip or not.”
No matter what the result would’ve been, everyone would’ve been proud of how much they have achieved.
“We are very very proud of them,” Swecker said. “We would’ve been proud of them no matter what, but they really did a great job.”