Mesa all-girl robotics team wins 1st place at World Championship

An all-girl robotics team from Mesa, Arizona, earned the top award at this year’s CREATE Jr. World Championship.

Alexis Ngo and Tara Yuenyongsgool are two eighth graders at ASU Prep Poly SPARK Institute. They brought home both the Honor Award, the competition’s top award, and second place in the Skills Competition.

Ngo and Yuenyongsgool spent the past eight months designing, testing and competing together; however, their latest robot, Johnny 20, was built in just one week. Johnny 20 is able to pick up as many as three small, semi-flexible, inflated playground balls at a time. 

The Maroon team, led by ASU Prep Robotics Teacher and Coach Matthew Chicci, alongside Ngo and Yuenyongsgool, joined “Arizona Horizon” to talk about their success.

“They were competing in groups of four. So they had to work with three other teams, figure out a plan and then turn around and execute that plan in a timed, stress situation. And when things didn’t go the way they were supposed to, they’d have to react on the fly and make it work out to the best of their ability,” Chicci said.

Ngo shared insight on the experience competing at the CREATE Jr. World Championship.

“When I first joined I was pretty worried, cause like I wasn’t sure how much I was capable of in a robot that was made in one week. And like just really stressed about it because it’s a world competition. But when we arrived there and I started practicing, things went a little smoother. But when we actually went into a game, I was like wait, this is actually decently a lot easier than I remembered or what I thought it would be,” Ngo said.