In the blue shirts, Ehren Elder, left, and Alexander Runke start their robot while Steven Chakerian and Mark Mekkittikul watch.

Eight teams of local fourth- through eighth-grade students have earned berths in the Northern California FIRST LEGO League Tournament Jan. 14 in San Jose. More than 100 students on 23 teams vied for the chance to advance to the regional event in the Los Altos tournament held last Saturday at Covington Elementary and Oak Avenue schools.

Teams from Blach, Loyola, Oak and Springer schools participated at Oak. Teams from Almond, Covington, Egan, Santa Rita and Bullis Charter schools competed at Covington.

Team “20,000 Bricks” - Michael, Rebecca and Brian Burks of Los Altos; Brandon Young of Cupertino; Alex Luh and Leslie and Gregory Irwin of San Jose - won the highest honor, the Director’s Award, for robot performance and design, research project and teamwork in the Covington event. Team “Lego Legends” - Steven Chakerian, Ehren Elder, Mark Mekkittikul and Alexander Runke, all of Los Altos - won the Director’s Award at Oak.

For their research projects on the theme “Ocean Odyssey,” 20,000 Bricks studied threats to sea otters, and Lego Legends designed a way to get clean, renewable energy from the ocean. The teams built robots using special LEGO Mindstorms kits containing a small controller, a few motors and sensors and LEGO construction parts. The robots must undertake a variety of ocean-themed challenges, including raising flags to mark a sunken ship, moving a submarine from a research vessel made of LEGO bricks and recovering and moving a variety of objects around a 4-by-8-foot playing field.

Tim Burks directed the Covington tournament, and Michael Schuh directed the Oak event. They were aided by dozens of volunteers who judged robots, refereed matches, announced the action and compiled scores, among many other tasks.

For more information, visit www.LosAltosRobotics.org, e-mail Michael Schuh at Michael@LosAltosRobotics.org or attend the next Los Altos Robotics board of directors meeting, 7:30-9 p.m. Nov. 29 at St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church, 2094 Grant Road, Mountain View.