MANILA, Philippines—A team of 32 Filipino students and a robot named “Larry Labuyo” won two awards in a robotics regional competition in Hawaii last week, earning for them a shot at the championship in Atlanta, Georgia.

Team Lagablab, composed of 32 third-year students from the Philippine Science High School, beat six other groups from the United States to win the Highest Rookie Seed Award at the regional FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Competition in Hawaii held from March 26 to 28.

The award was given to the neophyte delegation that garnered the most wins in the competition.

The team also won the Rookie All-Star award. This was given to the group that exhibited the most cooperation and team spirit.

Team Lagablab will compete with 300 teams from all over the world in the finals slated for April 16 to 18 in Atlanta.

With its entry, a robot named “Larry Labuyo” named after a local fighting cock, the team garnered five wins, five losses and a tie in the event in Hawaii. The Filipino delegation trounced entries from Prospect High School, Mililani High School, Damien Memorial High School, Farrington High School, Mid-Pacific Institute and Kalani High School.

Larry Labuyo was entered in a game called “Lunacy,” where participants tried to load as many “moon rocks” into the trailer of the opponent’s robot.

For the first 15 seconds of every two-minute round, “Larry Labuyo” was autonomous, taking directions only from the software written by the students and transmitted wirelessly to the robot through a laptop computer.

Cat Angangco, team captain, on Friday told the INQUIRER that they had to make last minute-changes to score their wins in the event.

“We saw the quality of the [robots of the] competition. We had to make some changes like upgrading the program and replacing some parts. But we did our best and we will do our best in Atlanta,” Angangco said.

Lance Co Ting Keh, team commander, said their success “shows that Filipinos can accomplish a lot if we work together.”

Science and Technology Secretary Estrella Alabastro said she was proud of the team’s accomplishments, expressing confidence that Team Lagablab would do well in Atlanta.

She said she hopes this would help inspire the youth to go into science and technology, noting that there were only around 100 scientists per 1 million population in the country, way below the United Nations standard of 350 per one million.

Alabastro is also trying to raise P3 million to be able to send the team to Atlanta. So far they have raised P1.5 million.