The kids from the Admiral Oaks Boys & Girls Club of Annapolis and Anne Arundel County (BGCAA) may not have won the First LEGO League state competition last weekend, but the loss did little to stifle their excitement.

“It was cool to see the kids get excited about it,” said Caleb Wolf, the program director for the Admiral Oaks club.

Of course, the team, Kentucky Fried Robots, missed out on a chance to travel to St. Louis to compete at the national competition.

“The guys were really hoping for it, but being our first year at states was pretty exciting, too,” Wolf said.

The competition, held Feb. 26 at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, judged the teams on the research for their projects and another section where they talked about their robotic design and how it would accomplish a specific task.

Then the teams had to perform various tasks with their robots on the competition floor.

There were 16 teams. The theme was Body Forward and tested ways to use robotics in medicine and surgery, Wolf said. Some of the tasks the teams had to perform were inserting a stent into an artery, putting on a cast or transporting a LEGO doctor to a patient area.

The Admiral Oaks team finished with 150 points, while the winning team had about 300 points.

Wolf said the competition has already begun to foster an interest in robotics. Already some kids has expressed interest in attending a robotics academy over the summer, he said.