Robots Attack Sheepshead Bay: Nerd Herd Rejoices!

A team of Sheepshead Bay’s four coolest youths, dubbed the Nerd Herd, is gearing up to take Atlanta’s Robotics World Festival by storm next month. Their early-model Johnny 5 robot, named “Thingamajig”, will soon be set with the task of destroying global competitors in a battle-to-the-death arena…

Okay, the robot won’t really be smashing up other robots, nor will there be AI-style Flesh Fairs involving exploding mecha and robot rights violations. But can’t a boy dream?

In reality – and not the movie wonderland of my sick, twisted imagination – the St. Edmund School (2474 Ocean Avenue & Avenue T) students will be competing with other Lego-based robots to complete a series of complicated tasks, such as moving and stacking more Legos.

This all comes after the quartet – Gregory Chin (12), Daniel Alvarez (14), Simon Shkreli (12) and Benjamin Kelk (12) – dominated the New York City FIRST Lego League Robotics Championship on March 7. Since their victory, the students have been winning hearts across the city, trying to raise $7,000 to cover the trip. When the bake sale results were tallied earlier this week to a scraggly $800 – not even enough for registration – the boys got wise about their fund raising strategy.

Their decision? Cookies are for chumps and muppets. They’re engineers; gods to the robots. So they took the kiddie gloves off, strapped on some man-sized media manipulating mittens – and blamo! – they got some ink in the Daily News.

Yesterday the Daily News reported on the chic geeks’ fundraising struggles. Their principal was quoted as saying she’d stop at nothing to get the boys there. “If I have to take a loan out, I don’t care,” Jean McEvoy told the News. “The kids are going.”

McEvoy wont need to take out a loan. After the article ran, donations started pouring in. It was floating around $3000 until this morning, when British vacuum cleaner exec James Dyson sealed the deal by donating $5000 to the cause.

http://www2.myfoxny.com/video/videoplayer.swf

This is great news for the community, but terrible news for ninjas, aliens and ninja aliens from Sheepshead Bay to Atlanta. Congratulations, Nerd Herd! We’ll all be rooting for you!