AUBURN — Auburn Middle School has announced its  robotics team took four first-place awards individually and al second overall award recently. The five-member Robotics Team of eighth-graders, Harley Lombard, Ezra Thomas, Zach Johnson, Alex Breton and John Allain, competed at Messalonskee Middle School.

Each won a first-place trophy in their events along with placing second as a team for the meet. The inventors, along with their coach/mentor Jim Rowe, had six weeks to design, build, program on laptops and test, retest and redesign their robots to meet the engineering challenge. The inventors, except for Lombard, designed and built their own creations.

Lombard won the speed build competition, having to memorize the plans for a 52-piece robot and build it from memory. He accomplished the feat in the shortest time of the competition: 3 minutes flat.

Meanwhile, fellow team member Allain built the fastest robot and raced against 20 others.

The Breton and Johnson pair built a machine that had to deliver as many ping-pong balls as possible into containers in 30 seconds, with 3 points awarded for the smaller container and 1 for the larger. They set a personal record of 130 points on the third trial.

Thomas built a robot that pulled the largest payload. Not only did his machine pull over 60 pounds in 3 seconds, he had tested up to 80 pounds previously — all this from a little machine that could fit in a shoebox.

The school’s next challenge is the Junior Solar Sprint, building solar/electric cars to compete at Owls Head on Saturday, June 9.

More information is available at www.auburnschl.edu/ams or by calling 333-6655.