The ROBOTMAK3RS sponsored a community Smart Boat Contest. Participants were challenged with the task of creating a smart boat that includes MINDSTORMS, BOOST, Powered UP, CONTROL+, WeDO or SPIKE Prime. The boat did not have to float on water. The winner of the contest was Hector Fernando Palomino Gutierrez from Lima, Peru.



Hector has been building with LEGO robots since 2012. He took a course called "Introduction to Mechatronics Engineering" at his university. One of the tasks in the course was to build a robot with an NXT core set to complete a challenge. That experience made him fall in love with LEGO MINDSTORMS. In 2015, he got a job as a high school teacher in educational robotics and now he continues working with MINDSTORMS.



To come up with this design, Hector started by looking for inspiration on Google and YouTube. When none of the models were to his liking, he started thinking about the WRO robots his students have made. He remembered that every robot has some type …