There was an important Milton first this past week — The First Annual Pierce Middle School Robotics Tournament! 10 teams from the Boston area recently travelled to Pierce Middle School to take part in it.

Pierce’s team, the Mooseheads (please see pictures below), has been led by David Romeo, Grade 7 science teacher. Milton High student Pat Kelly served as acting coach during the tournament, since Mr. Romeo was supervising the event. The middle-schoolers competed against one another with the theme of Bio-Medical Engineering: Body Forward.

“This program is designed to get children excited about science and technology — and teach them valuable employment and life skills,” said Mr. Romeo. “I am very proud of all my kids as they honored the sprit of friendly competition. As a bonus, they had a lot of fun!”

The mission of the competition was to research some aspect of the human body for either improving or altering our current understanding of the way the body works. Teams were judged on four aspects:

• Competition
• Project Judging
• Technical Judging
• Teamwork Judging

The following students are participating team members: Connor Bynre, Nolan Carvalho, Cole Salamone, Danny Stockbridge, Rudy Chase, Liam Chase, Abdul Naidjate, Joshua Kerry, Albert Enyedy, Markell Luc, Zac Longinidis, Alden Hebard, Will Breslin, Amen Negassi, Yusuff Solmon, Joseph O’Connor, Alex Dustin, Zack Fischer and Alden Heberd.

The Pierce team plans to compete in several more of these types of tournaments throughout the remainder of the school year.The next tournament will be a state qualifying tournament on December 4 at North Quincy High School.

In addition to Mr. Romeo, the following Pierce Middle School staff members helped to make this event a huge success: Dawn Sykes, Stephanie Sherman, Ann Saur, Kristin Cotter, Christopher Callahan, Louisa McCarthy, Saviz Safizadeh, Tracy Anthony, Kathy Bertrand, Scott Williams (Custodian), John Riley (Custodian), Jill Markarian, Jeff Stoodt, Jackie Morgan (and staff), Andy Boles, Anna McReynolds and Emcee Larry Dorr!

photos courtesy of Moira Downes – please click on an image for a larger version.