On Saturday, February, 11, FTC Team 9789 TOXIC competed against 31 outstanding teams at the Ohio State Championship. They were recognized with the Inspire Award, the top honor given to a team.
The FTC (FIRST Tech Challenge) season started on September 10, 2016, with an International Game Kick-off. Teams gathered with 2-15 students and began designing robots to solve the game tasks. In early December, teams started attending Qualifying Tournaments in hopes of being invited to the State Championship.
Ohio held six Qualifiers this season to determine the top 32 teams. Invited teams included two from Pennsylvania, two from Michigan, two from Indiana and the balance from Ohio. Some teams traveled up to 6 hours for the opportunity to compete in the Championship Tournament.
FTC is more than just robots. It is also about the journey, the design, the building practices and the relationship within the community. These aspects are recognized in judged award categories. TOXIC won five second place finishes for the following awards. The Promote Award is given to a team that creates a 60 second public service announcement video. The PTC Design Award is for the design process and use of CAD software. The Rockwell Collins Innovate Award is for outstanding and unique building elements included in the robot. The Connect Award is for creating and sustaining relationships within the community with professional engineers. And the Think Award is for outstanding documentation in their engineering notebook.
The highest honor is the Inspire Award. Here is how FIRST describes this award: This is given to the team that truly embodied the ‘challenge’ of the FIRST Tech Challenge program. The Team that received this award is a strong ambassador for FIRST programs and a role model FIRST Tech Challenge Team. The Team is a top contender for many other judged awarded and is a gracious competitor. The Inspire Award winner is an inspiration to other Teams, acting with Gracious Professionalism both on and off the playing fields. This Team is able to communicate their experiences, enthusiasm and knowledge to other Teams, sponsors, their community, and the judges. Working as a unit, this Team will have demonstrated success in accomplishing the tasks of designing and building a robot.
TOXIC was selected as the Inspire Award Winner for Ohio this season. They earned the Inspire Award last season in Michigan.
TOXIC will compete at the Indiana State Championship with 31 other teams on February 25. They will not be eligible for the Inspire Award as you can only win it once at the State level each season. With the victory in Ohio, they also received an invitation to the North Super Regional in Iowa on March 30th. There they will compete against 72 of the best teams from 11 States in hopes of earning a bid to the World Championships in April.
All three GEARS teams have qualified for the Indiana State Championship. We look forward to seeing how 9790 Vier Left and 12014 Fire Wires do at the Championship and hope that they might be able to join TOXIC at the NSR.
