Primoris Academy Rockets to 1ST at NJ FIRST LEGO League Event

The Primoris Academy Lions Team, middle school students, placed first for Research Presentation at the New Jersey FIRST LEGO League Competition and placed fifth for the Robot Game. Eighty teams competed at the state championship. To qualify for the event, at Mount Olive High School in Flanders, New Jersey on December 8th and 9th, 2018, the team won first place for Research at the FIRST LEGO League Bergen Brickfest Qualifying Tournament at Pascack Hills High School in Montvale, NJ on November 17th 2018.

This year’s Into Orbit research area focused on space engineering. Each team was required to identify a problem faced by astronauts in space travel, study solutions to the problem and either design an innovative solution to the problem or improve upon a present one. Teams were encouraged to share their ideas with experts, get feedback and then adjust their designs. The Primoris Lions team’s winning project, Particle Protection Project (P3 ), deals with the space dust that astronauts come in contact with when they walk in space and aims to prevent the dust from entering the spacecraft. The particles are known to cause bronchitis and cancer. At present, the electromagnetic dust is swept and vacuumed off the astronauts’ suits. This removes about 80% of the dust. The students designed a chamber in which magnets remove most of the remaining dust before they enter. Team members include Bodhi Mathur of Oradell, Dawning Fu of Westwood, Donkon Lee of Palisades Park, Minseok Son of Cresskill, Frank DePaulo of Fair Lawn, Matthew Lee of Allendale, Anthony Kim of Old Tappan, Mythreya Dharani of Paramus , and Andrew Brahms of Morris Plains.

The Primoris Academy Cubs Team, aged 8 to 10, also had a successful year. They placed second for Research in their division at the FIRST LEGO League Bergen Brickfest Qualifying Tournament. Their project, Orbital Debris Decay System, deals with the problem of space debris. There are more than 500,000 pieces of debris between 1 and 10 centimeters in diameter in the lower Earth orbit. These can collide with spacecraft. If they collide with each other, they break into more fragments. The Orbital Debris Decay System uses electroadhesion to redirect the debris into the lower atmosphere where it then burns up. The system was designed by team members Gabriel Herr of Franklin Lakes, Shailen Shah of Hillsdale, Michael Pylypovych and Anton Badushov of Glen Rock, Wyatt Remegio of Old Tappan, Jed Sloan of New York City, Emmanuel Zhang of Closter, Colin Burrows of Paramus, Ari Wachtel of Fair Lawn, and Reed Kane of New Milford.

This is the third year that Primoris Academy has competed in the FIRST LEGO League Competition and the second year they participated in the state championship. Primoris Academy is a non-profit, private school in Westwood, New Jersey. The robotics teams are lead by Olga Pylypovych, of Glen Rock, the engineering and computer science teacher. Team members valued the opportunity to practice their skills in teamwork, communication, and collaboration and to use their imagination to develop solutions to real world problems. They are looking forward to the 2019 research challenge.