Otago Boys’ High School students Declan Gemmell, 14, Jack Orlovich, 14, Stuart Scott, 15, and Ryder Greig, 15 — aka the "Indiana Drones" — won the First Lego League national competition last year and are heading to the United States to represent New Zealand at the world festival in April.
But the boys need about $30,000 to pay for flights, accommodation and food.
To get over the line, they are hosting a bingo night with band Two Fat Ladies at the Green Island Rugby Club tonight.
Ryder said they had done two sausage sizzles so far and received donations from the Otago Boys’ old boys foundation, which covered the cost of their flights to Texas.
They were halfway through their fundraising effort to pay for accommodation during their stay in the United States.
The boys had done a lot of hard work to qualify for the worlds, including spending hours building robots and coming up with innovative ideas to take with them.
Stuart was learning to write software code in Python to build the robot in his spare time.
In the past their innovative idea to 3-D print replicas of fossil bones to examine them for research had helped them win the national Lego League competition.
They were looking forward to the opportunity to visit the Nasa headquarters during their time in Houston and meeting other students from around the world.
