The robotic season is not over for two local teams. Team 4924 Tuxedo Pandas and Team 401 Copperhead Robotics are going to the FIRST Championship in Detroit, Michigan to compete against the nation’s and world’s best robotics teams.
FIRST Tech Challenge, FTC, Team 4924 is composed of students from five different schools in Montgomery County who meet at the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center. They won their spot in the championship by winning the Inspire Award winner and willing alliance at the Richlands competition. At the Virginia State level championship in Richmond on February 2, Team 4924 advanced to, but didn’t win, the final round of completion with their alliance partners in their division.
With this amount of effort on the playing field and winning the Think Award, the seven team members were ranked fourth out of top nine teams to continue to the FIRST Championship in Detroit.
Meanwhile, Team 4924 hosted a FIRST Lego League and a FIRST Tech Challenge tournament in Montgomery County in late 2018. After that, they traveled to Jamaica to help host an FTC event and helped FIRST Global conduct a tournament in Mexico City, Mexico.
“The FIRST World Championship is an exciting celebration of STEM with the best teams in the nation and many other countries represented. We are proud that the Tuxedo Pandas earned their spot for the sixth time after a long and successful season of competition and many outreach events in our community,” Coach Franky Marchand said.
FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) Team 401 is a program of Montgomery County Public Schools. The program is for any high school students from any of the four high schools to learn higher robotic skills two nights a week at Christiansburg High School.
Once the completion challenges were announced in early January, Team 401 went into overdrive every available day and hour to build their robot before a Feb. 22 deadline.
Team 401 traveled to Portsmouth and achieved a rank of 13 out of 37 teams. Team 401 hosted an FRC district qualifier at Blacksburg High School for 34 high school teams from across Virginia, Maryland and D.C. Team 401 increased its ranking to seventh and won the coveted Chairman’s Award.
With enough ranking points in FIRST Chesapeake District, Team 401 traveled to George Mason University for a weekend in mid-April to compete with 59 other teams.
After 116 qualifying matches, Team 401 ranked twelfth and was picked by the fifth alliance captain. Team 401 and their two alliance teams progressed through the quarter and semi-finals to the final round of best of two matches. After a tie-breaking match, Team 401 and their alliance partners won the District Championship and a spot in the Detroit FIRST Championship.
“These high school students have built a collegiate-level team and a robot that is capable of competing on the world stage,” Coach and BHS Teacher Michael Colliver said, “The deep rooted and long-lasting collaboration between MCPS, our community and Virginia Tech School of Education has kept this team going for twenty years and will carry us to Detroit.”
“We are very proud of how our team is able to overcome any problem and never give up,” Coach and CHS Teacher Nancy Boreth said of Team 401
Both Teams 4924 and 401 completed numerous outreach projects in the community. Team 401 students collaborated at many school STEM or science events to show off their robots and allow young children to take a closer look at the dynamics of the robot and how to operate it.
Team 4924 has been teaching Girl Scouts the Robotics Journey badges and speaking to Pulaski County teachers about how to start FIRST teams.
On April 23, both Tuxedo Pandas and Copperheads will travel to get set up and show off their talents for four days with 160 FTC and 700 FRC teams from across the United States and more than eleven countries.