Meet Delaware’s hall of fame robotics team

The key to success is diversity for the Miracle Workerz, Delaware’s premier high school robotics team. Actually, the team is so successful, they even have their own official day and their own Wikipedia page.
The Miracle Workerz, who also go by the nickname MOE 365 (Miracles of Engineering), deserve the accolades. The team has been crushing robotics competitions on a regional and national level ever since winning the FIRST Robotics Competition world championship back in 2001 with their robot Li’l MOE.
“Diversity” might be an understatement. According to the team’s PR manager Holly Quinn, 35-40 percent of the team is female.
“The team tries to be about half boys and half girls,” Quinn said, adding that the team also strives to create ethnic diversity within the group, which is sponsored by DuPont.
The 40 10th-12th grade students on the team come from 13 different high schools in New Castle County (including a few homeschooled students) and split off into different areas of focus — mechanical design, mechanical build, electrical, programming, welding and strategy, to name a few.

The team is so popular that its managers have no choice but to be extremely selective when bringing in new team members every year. And with robotics getting more and more popular in the schools (Quinn said some local high schools like Dickinson even offer a robotics pathway), the selection process will continue to narrow.
“As more kids want to be a part of it, I’m not sure what’s going to happen,” said Quinn. “It’ll split. There’ll be more teams.”
That’s already happened at Middletown, where robotics are so popular that the school itself has two teams. The state of Delaware itself has approximately 150 teams already — though most are younger LEGO robotics teams.
“I think it’s just starting to really explode,” Quinn said. “It’s only going to get bigger pretty quickly as all these new teams on the  younger levels are starting up.”