Harker 8th-grader wins robotics awards Tuesday, May 05, 2009 By San Jose Mercury News Sierra Lincoln, an eighth-grader at the Harker School in San Jose, has won three awards at the VEX Robotics Championship of the Americas in Omaha, Neb. Sierra, whose one-person team "Cylon and Friends" was paired with a team from Omaha, won second place in the championship tournament, which was attended by nearly 100 teams from the United States and Canada. In individual events, Sierra was named programming skills champion and robot skills champion, both awards based on the number of points scored by a robot. In the VEX competitions, each team builds and programs a robot to perform certain tasks, such as dropping cubes into goals on the field.