Upper School Robotics Team Heads to Regionals
UPDATE:
The 2014–15 School year has three Principia robotics teams participating in FIRST competitions:
-A Lower/Middle School team in October's FIRST Lego League (FLL). -The Upper School Mecha Pantheras team in December's FIRST Tech Challenge, where they won first place for engineering process. -Upper School’s Optimus Prin team in the spring 2015 FRC (FIRST Robotics Competition), having won the Rookie All-Star Award in 2014.
The original post begins here:
This is a year of firsts for the robotics program at Principia!
Next week, during spring break, a group of Upper School students will be competing in the FIRST Robotics St. Louis Regionals to be held on April 14 and 15 at St. Louis University's Chaifetz Arena. In November, a smaller team of Middle and Lower School students entered the FIRST LEGO League competition and performed very respectably for first-time competitors.
The Upper School team, Optimus Prin, includes the juniors and seniors who are currently enrolled in the Engineering and Technology (Robotics) class, as well as four freshmen and a sophomore (front row, in the photo) who have volunteered their afterschool time to work on building and programming the robot.
Like all other high school teams, the Principia students had just six weeks after getting their official kit to build the robot and program it to perform a set of required tasks. Then they had to seal up the machine, which can only be opened in front of the inspectors right before the competition begins next week.
FIRST—“For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology”—is a nonprofit organization established to promote technology education. The FIRST Robotics competition is targeted at high school-age students, and the FIRST LEGO League competition is aimed at students in grades 4–8. FIRST competitions are held in several countries around the world, all operating under the same guidelines and timeframes. The U.S. finals, which are very competitive, are hosted in St. Louis in the Edward Jones Dome in late April.
Get a student’s eye-view of the inner workings of Optimus Prin on our School blog.
And if you are in the St. Louis area and would like to watch our students competing, contact robots@principia.edu for details.