The I.J. Holton Engineers sixth-grade robotics teams will take on high school and college students at the State Championship this weekend.

“I’m nervous but I’m trying to be happy, and I want to be able to go in there and do our best and hope we go to world [competition],” Riley Haugen, 11, said. “I’m the driver so I have a lot of pressure on me, so by myself it’s kind of like, ‘Oh, boy.’”

Riley is one of 16 sixth-grade students on the robotics club at I.J. Holton Intermediate School, which split into two teams to help the students get more hands-on experience. The teams have competed in Albert Lea and Osseo, and both tied for fourth place in the previous competition against 50 teams. The club was invited to compete at the State Championship in St. Cloud this weekend.

Riley joined the team to meet new friends and help find new ways to be more creative, but he has gotten more than that.

“It’s hard work to build this kind of high-tech robot, and you have to know how to be able to drive and how to be able to make and construct the robot for every challenge that comes,” he said.

“Once you know what you’re doing and once you have a working robot, your challenges are a little easier,” he added. “But it’s when the robot doesn’t do what you want where you get frustrated.”

Kaylene Jensen, Project Lead The Way teacher for design lab and automation and robotics classes, is excited about the students’ success.

“They worked really hard, and they absolutely deserve this opportunity,” she said.

The students don’t just play with robots. A lot of learning is done on the robotics team. Jensen said the robots start as pieces in a box. The students build the robot, learning about mechanisms, ratios, torque and force, different lift systems, chassis, which wheels to choose and more. They have also learned about programming code and working with many types of motors.

“There’s so many things they have learned, as well as collaboration, problem solving, teamwork,” Jensen said.

The students started competing in preliminary rounds on Friday, and the competitions was scheduled to continue Saturday morning with bracket play on Saturday afternoon.

People can download the app VEX Via to watch the students’ progress during the competition. Jensen said the teams they will be up against include a college team, a few middle-school teams and mostly high-school teams.

“It’s pretty cool that our sixth-graders are holding their own,” she said.

For Jackson Marsh, 12, competing has been fun, but learning has been better.

“I’ve learned so much,” he said. “Going into the season I basically knew nothing about this, and now I could consider myself an expert because I’ve learned so much.”

He has enjoyed making new friends with his teammates, who he didn’t know before joining the group. Jackson said being on the team has helped him in the classroom.

“We do have a class on robotics but definitely not this advanced,” he said. “Also it’s helped me in other classes because we do have to use a lot of math, science, and stuff like that, in building and developing the robot.”

But team members like Jackson didn’t take all the credit.

“Mrs. Jensen, our mentor, has been a huge help to us,” Jackson said. “I definitely want to give her credit. … She has taught us tons of stuff about teamwork and about the robotics.”

Jackson hopes to continue with a team in the future, and recommends any fifth-grade students to give robotics a try.

“Be ready for hard work, but the success of working hard is tremendous,” he said. “It’s a lot of fun getting to learn about stuff like this.”

Jensen said the program will continue, though it may look different in the future.

“I’ve already been scouting the fifth-graders that are on Lego team … and the response is really exciting, because they see what these kids are doing,” Jensen said. “So they have built this momentum for this VEX Robotics that I couldn’t have done on my own.”

While looking forward to the future, Jensen is still savoring the team’s success this school year.

“These kids, what they have done with these robots just absolutely takes my breath away when I think about how far they’ve come over this season,” Jensen added. “It’s really hard to describe how excited I am over what they’ve accomplished.”