Suburban LEGO team is No. 2 -- out of 13,700

The boys who make up Team STEELE look more or less like an average group of kids. Their height runs the gamut as does the length of their hair, and their comments are often followed by a goofy laugh and smile.

However, the team's finish in the First Lego League World Festival - second place in a pool that started with 13,700 teams from 49 countries - is anything but average.

Caleb Schiller, 11, of Hoffman Estates, Alexander Meyer, 14, of Kildeer, Barrett Kaufman, 14, and his 12-year-old brother, Zachary, both of Lake Zurich, and Ryan Cushman, 15, and Dylan Antonides, 13, both of Wauconda are all home-schooled. They worked as a team to build and program a robot and complete a research project for the competition.

"Making it to the intergalactic round was our goal," Antonides said.

The robot they built is fairly small - about the size of a remote-controlled car. It had to be small enough to maneuver around a table and pick up and transport objects. The team programmed it to finish its missions and it has the capacity to correct itself if, say, it isn't in proper position to grab and lift an object.

Between 300 and 400 hours went into competition preparation in the past year. The robot runs on six AA batteries, and the team members estimate they have gone through 1,400 batteries preparing it to compete.

During competition, the robot has 2 minutes and 30 seconds or less to execute missions based on the theme of climate connections, such as raising a house onto stilts and delivering a scientist to a research area.

Only 84 teams qualified for the final, international round of the competition April 15 to 18. The team had to fight to find finances to get to the Georgia Dome in Atlanta for the final.

"We didn't know if we'd be able to go if we didn't raise the money," said Sara Kaufman, one of the team's coaches.

Team STEELE had come this far and finding some extra funds proved as manageable a task as programming the robot. The team flexed their marketing and communications muscles to bring in sponsors to the tune of $15,000 in six weeks.

"The boys had to learn how to make cold calls," Sara Kaufman said. "They presented to storekeepers and to $200 million corporations. That was pretty amazing to watch 11- to 14-year-old kids (making pitches.)"

Team STEELE, which stands for Superbly Tenacious Engineers Exuding Lego Excellence, insists the simple design of its robot was an important factor in its success.

"We are the only team that we saw with one attachment," Barrett Kaufman said. "Most of the teams used big attachments but we completed all our missions with one attachment."

Half the team will move on to the high school level competition next year, while the others look to fill three vacancies in their organization.