Westbrook WIRED Robotics Wins First at BEST Competition

Westbrook Intermediate’s WIRED Robotics team won the first place BEST Award at the North Houston BEST (Boosting Engineering, Science, and Technology) Robotics Competition. This is the highest award given to students.

The team, made up of 31 students from 6^th through 8^th grade, and is led by Les Quiocho, NASA robotics engineer and mentor, and Lisa Pfeifer, faculty advisor. The team hosted the competition at Westbrook with schools across Southeast Texas.

“The competition involved mainly high school teams, so having an intermediate school win the top honor is very impressive,” Superintendent Dr. Eric Williams said as the team was celebrated at the recent Board of Trustees meeting. “We are inspired this evening by your troubleshooting, dealing with unanticipated challenges and your accomplishments.”

WIRED also took home first place for their marketing presentation, website and earned the Founder’s Award for the most creative robot design. Other components of the competition included developing an engineering notebook, community outreach, interviews and robot construction.

“These students are known in the Houston robotics' community as a team willing to mentor other teams and help them get a robot ready for competition,” said Lisa Pfeifer. “The team demonstrates their robot in community outreach events and at local elementary schools to educate the public about the benefits of BEST Robotics and STEM.”

WIRED advances to Texas BEST Regional Championship in Frisco, Texas, on Dec. 2-4, 2021. The team will compete in all categories against the top teams from Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and Oklahoma, many of which are engineering magnet high schools. This is the 15th year WIRED has advanced to Texas BEST with the first qualification coming in 2006.

Click here to watch the team in action.