Somerset County Freeholders Shanel Y. Robinson, Deputy Director Patricia L. Walsh and Director Brian D. Levine, with Principal Oguz Yildiz, present citations to Gagan Voona and Levant Yildiz, students at the Thomas Edison EnergySmart Charter School in Franklin. Photo: Somerset County Board of Chosen Freeholders.

Two students at Thomas Edison EnergySmart Charter School on Pierce Street received acknowledgement recently for winning a robotics competition.

Gagan Voona and Levant Yildiz received citations from Somerset County Freeholders Shanel Y. Robinson, Deputy Director Patricia L. Walsh and Director Brian D. Levine. The students are state champions of the VEX IQ Challenge, a contest sponsored by the Robotics Education & Competition Foundation. During this game-based robotics engineering challenge, teams of students were asked to design and build a robot that had the capability of playing against other teams’ robots in the competition.

The tournament was held in Long Hill earlier in March, according to TEECS principal Oguz Yildiz. The students, under the team name E-Smart, won the First Place award for Excellence. The award qualifies E-Smart to represent New Jersey at the World Championship Tournament to be held in Kentucky in April.