By handling hockey pucks oh so carefully, five local junior high students have accomplished what the Calgary Flames could not.

The robotics students from John Ware School won an international competition in Atlanta, Georgia, last month, beating out teams with their puckhandling skills. “It was amazing,” says Alberta Longhorns member Alex Rodrigues, 13, of the victory at the Georgia Dome.

Unlike the Flames, however, the Longhorns themselves didn’t actually touch a puck. They left that task to a robot they designed and programmed in Calgary. “Its job in the game was to collect hockey pucks out of a puck rack… and put them into a 20-inch-high goal,” explains Rodrigues.

Having prepped for the competition by setting up a practice field in Rodrigues’s living room weeks earlier, the Longhorns completed the course in one minute, making them world champions in the FIRST Tech Challenge, along with two American teams and their robots. Rodrigues says the experience kindled an interest in engineering amongst him and his teammates. “Probably a lot of us will be pursuing that.”