EPIC Engineering Coaches Super 7 Team of Elementary School Students to Trophy in State Robotics Competition

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Central Florida’s Super 7 team of Seminole County elementary school students from Stenstrom Elementary, Evans Elementary, Tuskawilla Montessori and St. Luke’s Lutheran School earned the “Rising Star” trophy in FIRST LEGO League state championship competition recently.

Sponsored and coached by EPIC Engineering and Consulting Group, (EPIC) at the University of Central Florida’s Business Incubation Program, the Super 7 team designed, built and programmed a LEGO-based robot for the competition.

EPIC chief executive officer Prasad Chittaluru, coached the seven member team, including two of his own children.

“The theme for this year’s competition was Biomedical Engineering and the kids chose the central nervous system as their focus,” Chittaluru said.

“The kids researched and learned about the diseases of the nervous system and chose to study MS, a disease that can cause many problems such as blurred vision, loss of balance, slurred speech, numbness, extreme fatigue, memory problems, paralysis and blindness,” Chittaluru explained.

Using a programmable computer motor module and a defined set of LEGO parts, the Super 7 team designed, built, programmed and tested a LEGO robot from scratch that can autonomously perform up to 12 tasks in 2.5 minutes.

“It was very sophisticated work. I had a blast coaching these wonderful kids and learned with them,” Chittaluru said.

“The kids did everything from design to construction and all the programming in the computer,” said Shri Varadarajulu, co-coach and a team parent.

They had so much fun doing it that they are already planning on competing in next year’s competition,” Varadarajulu added.

“These kids are very bright and hard working and did an excellent job competing. Now we want to make it to the national competition,” she added.

The team was also supported by AMD and the ASCE East Central Florida Branch.

About EPIC Engineering & Consulting Group, LLC

EPIC Engineering & Consulting Group, LLC (EPIC) is a Central Florida-based engineering and IT solutions provider. EPIC simplifies their clients' operations by streamlining business processes, eliminating redundancies in data capture, analysis and retrieval, and assisting them in transforming their business information into actionable intelligence resulting in saving time and money. They apply their decades of experience in business process optimization and enterprise software applications development to designing and implementing powerful yet simple to use solutions for the public and private sector organizations, human services agencies and utilities. For more information visit www.epicgroupllc.com.

About the UCF Business Incubation Program:

Since its founding in 1999, the UCF Business Incubation Program has helped more than 160 emerging companies (including nearly 100 current clients) create over $800 million in annual revenue and more than 1,600 new jobs with an average salary of $59,000. With eight – and soon nine – facilities opened across the Greater Orlando community, the Business Incubation Program is a collaboration in economic development between the University of Central Florida, Orange County, the City of Orlando, Seminole County, the City of Winter Springs, The City of Sanford, Lake County, the City of Leesburg, Osceola County, the City of Kissimmee, City of St. Cloud, the Florida High Tech Corridor Council and will be adding Volusia County. For more information, please visit www.incubator.ucf.edu.