The Girls of Extraordinary Mind Strength robotics team, consisting of three West County Girl Scouts, won the Champions Award at the recent Eastern Missouri First Lego League Championship.

The teams conduct research, build and program a Lego Mindstorms robot to explore ways in which food can become contaminated and then propose solutions for preventing or combating the contaminates.

The team members were ninth-graders Laurel Button, of Ballwin, Roopal Goel, of Ballwin, and Kelly Roth, of Oakville, who researched tomato contamination and studied how to prevent salmonella.

They researched other products that already existed to test for salmonella or E. coli and found there were test strips available for purchase but that they were expensive. The girls decided to transform test strips into a thread, to become a part of a paper towel. They designed a paper towel that would be laced with inactive antibodies to detect salmonella. Consumers are instructed to wash their tomato and use the paper towel to dry it off. If the tomato contains traces of salmonella, the paper towel will change color within 10 seconds.