Team Hive, a Peterborough-based FIRST Lego League robotics team, is headed over the border to Canada for an international robotics championship in June.
The team received an invitational seat to the FIRST — For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology — Canada Cup of Robotics Niagara 2026 after finishing fourth at the state FIRST Lego League championship in December.
“We’re really proud of them, and we’re really proud we got invited to Canada,” said coach Stephanie Buzzell of Peterborough. “Everyone is super excited.”
The team will be refining their coding and improving the performance of their robot, Sir Top Hat, between now and the trip to Canada.
Team Hive also won first place in the Robot Design category at the FIRST Lego state championship competition in Bedford, and they finished first in demonstrating the program’s core values of discovery, innovation, impact, inclusion, teamwork, and fun, at the qualifiers tournament in Merrimack.
“This team has learned and grown up together, and it goes way beyond robotics,” Buzzell said.
Buzzell has coached Team Hive for four years. The six team members, who range in age from 8 to 14 and are part of a homeschooling community, live in Peterborough, Antrim, Henniker and Massachusetts. The team is fundraising for their trip, including an online Lego-jar guessing contest.
“Anyone is welcome to participate in the game for a chance to win a prize,” Buzzell said. “Donations are appreciated but they are not required to play.”
Anyone who wants to take part in the game can participate at: anieshive.org/robotics.
Each year, FIRST Lego League teams are assigned two challenges: constructing a robot using Lego parts, which must be coded to accomplish specific tasks and completing an “Innovation” research project, which has a different theme every year.
The members of Team Hive say they constructed their robot in “more of a cube” shape this year to make it more durable, and have been practicing swapping out the different attachments needed for different challenges in the competitions.
“The robot is pretty strong, but the attachments are fragile, and you have to be really careful taking them on and off,” said team member Jay Buzzell. “You only have two and a half minutes to swap out the parts, so you want to be as fast and precise as you can, or you have to do the whole mission over again.”
“Their robot last year was a little fragile, so they learned from that,” Coach Buzzell said. “You just try to get as many points on the board as you can for the different parts of the competition, and last year they learned they spent way too much time on attachments.”
Team Hive named this year’s robot “Sir Top Hat” after their top-hat wearing robot from last year.
“The put a top hat on their robot last year which spun when they ran the attachments,” Buzzell said. “This year, they’re planning to add the top hat when we go to Canada.”
Team members say they all have different strengths, and work cooperatively on different aspects of the challenges.
“Oftentimes we will have multiple people working on the same thing. If you team up it’s always better,” said team member Jameson Buzzell. “But you also don’t want everyone working on the same thing all at once.”
Buzzell says he enjoys “the hands on part of it,” and the “actual building of the robot.”
Finn Maidment, who is the youngest member of the team at age 8, said he “loves coding.”
“Coding is my favorite part,” he said.
Loghan Walden said that because of his work with Team Hive, he’s thinking of becoming a computer programmer.
“Coding is really fun,” he said.
Andrew Correa, said he “loves building the robot and attachments.”
The “Innovation” research topic, archaeology, led the members of Team Hive to a field trip at America’s Stonehenge in Salem, where they met with a professional archaeologist.
“We learned that’s it kind of connected to England’s Stonehenge, and they used the stars to design it,” Jameson Buzzell said.
Buzzell said the team went “all-in” with archaeology.
“They met with archaeologists throughout the season, they learned all about the field, and they identified several problems withing the field of archaeology and thought about how to address them,” Stephanie Buzzell said.
The team built a model of America’s Stonehenge and created a “Minecraft” game designed to spread awareness of archaeology to the general public.
“The problems they identified in archaeology are a lack of general interest, lack of volunteers, and lack of funding,” Stephanie Buzzell said. “The team put put together a curriculum, using America’s Stonehenge as an example. They built a game mode of the Stonehenge so people can go through the site and learn about it and other sites, including the Great Pyramids as well as other Monadnock region sites.”
Team Hive will be at the upcoming Hawaiian Weekend at Pat’s Peak and other community events around the region to demonstrate their robot and display their work. They will be headed to Canada Cup of Robotics in Niagara the week of June 13. For more information, go to anieshive.org/event-details/robotics-team-1.