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8 Dec 2011
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FTC Regional Champions
Our team competed in the Regional FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) at the Southwest Virginia Community College on Saturday, December 3, 2011. Team 4924 was in second place going into the semifinals and will now advance to the State Level robotics state championship. FIRST “For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology,” encourages students to pursue math and science careers through sports-like robotics competitions, building enthusiasm for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math fields (STEM).

Team 4924 members, aka “Tuxedo Pandas” include: Ethan Bass, Alexis Marchand, and Kallista Winters of CMS; Austin Downs, Adrian Ruvalcaba, and Kent Anderson of BMS.
Team Photo
(left to right) Kent Anderson, Alexis Marchand, Kallista Winters, Adrian Ruvalcaba, Ethan Bass, Austin Downs

They also won the third place Inspiration Award and first place Motivate Award as well were finalists for the PTC Design and Rockwell Collins Innovate awards. Team 4924 Head Coach was Franky Marchand along with assistants, Henry Bass, Paco Ruvalcaba, Michelle Winters, Dean Downs and Eric Anderson. Over the last six months, Team 4924 learned to cut metal, use a milling machine, bandsaw, drill-press and pop-rivet gun. They also learned about programming in C, and prototyping their designs before building.

Their robot, “LuLu” is named for the parallelogram arm used to grab crates. Team member Ethan Bass said, “We didn’t have the chance in this competition to put LuLu to full use. There were 100 loose racquetballs on the field, plus 3 other robots, making for a lot of craziness! We plan to improve our arm so that we can put crates of balls on top of LuLu, then raise the crates with our four-foot scissor jack.” Coach Franky Marchand pointed out that his team was a rookie team, with five seventh-graders and one eighth-grader pitted against high-school students. “We’re ecstatic to have placed second in the qualifying round, as well as our Inspiration and Motivate awards, with such a new team. We attribute this to our experience in FIRST Lego League.” FIRST Lego League is a related tournament for ages 9-14 using Lego.

FTC is designed for students who want to compete head to head, using a sports model. Teams are responsible for designing, building, and programming their robots to compete in an alliance format against other teams. Teams, including coaches, mentors and volunteers, are required to develop strategy and build robots based on sound engineering principles. Team 4924 has been working under the mentorship of the the Montgomery County FRC (FIRST Robotics Team) Team 401 at the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center since August to design, prototype, use tools to build and log all work effort into an engineering logbook.

The State FTC Championship will be held in Richmond, Virginia on March 3, 2012.

 
Family , General , STEM
posted by  henry at  12:17 | comments [0] | trackbacks [0]


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