Last weekend, a team composed of Harker eighth graders Nidhya Shivakumar and Amrita Pasupathy, known as Paradigm, allied with team Black Jaguar of Redwood City to win the California VEX Robotics Middle School State Championships in Sunnyvale.

At this state competition, Paradigm won every qualifying match and ranked first in the qualifying rounds. They allied with team Black Jaguar going into the elimination rounds, proving formidable as they cruised through the elimination rounds and won the Tournament Champions Award.

VEX Robotics is the leading and fastest growing robotics program for middle school and high school level students. VEX Robotics competitions are held in cities, states and countries all over the world. In addition to providing a platform to learn engineering and programming, a VEX Robotics project encourages teamwork, leadership and problem solving.

Earlier, on Feb. 17, Paradigm allied with team Inobotics from Palo Alto and won the Google California Signature VEX Robotics championship hosted at the Google campus in Sunnyvale in a field of nearly 75 teams from across the country.

Paradigm will next go on to compete at VEX World Championships, held April 24-26 in Louisville, Ky. The World Championships hosts over 180 middle school teams and 600 high school teams from many states across the country, as well as teams from South America, China, Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore. Approximately 3 percent of middle school teams and 6 percent of high school teams competing at regional events move on to the World Championships.