Now that I’m editor, I don’t get the chance to cover a lot of events. Reporters Alex Perry and Kellie Adamson are becoming more well-known in the community as they attend meetings and cover all kinds of events.

But I did get the chance on April 28 to go to the Sea, Air and Land Challenge at King’s Fork Middle School. Sponsored by the Office of Naval Research and developed by the Electro-Optics Center at Penn State University, it was the first time the program had come to Virginia and also the first time middle-school teams participated.

There were teams from Forest Glen, John F. Kennedy and John Yeates middle schools and Lakeland and King’s Fork high schools as well as from the Norfolk Techncial Center.

The teens on these teams were impressive, to say the least.

The teams fundraised, designed, planned, wrote reports, purchased the parts, built their robots, tested and troubleshot and finalized their robots, all by themselves with mentors and teachers acting only in a supervisory role. At least one team even wound up making last-minute repairs to its robot after their creation rolled down the bleachers during the opening of the program.

These weren’t just your ordinary robots, either, if there even is such a thing. These robots not only could walk across the ground and perform tasks but also could fly and swim while seeking for, grabbing and dropping items in the right spot.

And to think, when I was in high school, never mind middle school, I was pretty content to curl up with a book in my free time, and I thought robots were something that existed only in sci-fi movies. Times sure have changed. Does that make me sound old?

Even so, I had a great time at the Sea, Air and Land Challenge watching these amazing kids work. Even when the team from Lakeland High School suffered a twisted claw on its aquatic robot and wasn’t able to pick up any blocks in the water tank, I still thought it was amazing the thing could swim by itself, while being controlled by a couple of team members, in the first place.

One of my favorite things to cover has always been — and this is a very general category — “cool things being done by young people,” and this event definitely fit. Congratulations to all of the participants, and I hope this event can return in the future for more robotics fun in Suffolk.