New York’s Tech Valley, RPI, host FIRST Robotics Competition

New York’s Tech Valley, RPI, host FIRST Robotics Competition

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will host the three-day New York Tech Valley FIRST Robotics Competition which gets underway in Troy on March 7, 2019.

The event will bring together student teams from across the Capital Region, New York state, New Jersey, Canada, and Brazil. In its sixth year, the New York Tech Valley FIRST® Regional Robotics Competition is said to be “where imagination and innovation come together.”

The event is expected to draw hundreds of high school students who will be immersed in a challenging space-themed simulation. They will all compete for a slot in the FIRST World Championship and more than $80 million in scholarship funding.

“Rensselaer values STEM education and inspiration in STEM. That is what we’re celebrating with this competition,” said Paul Schoch, director of the Rensselaer Center for Initiatives in Pre-College Education and a member of the New York Tech Valley FIRST planning committee.

Founded by famed inventor Dean Kamen, FIRST is a national organization that designs accessible, innovative programs to build self-confidence, knowledge, and life skills while motivating young people to pursue opportunities in science, technology, and engineering. In the annual FIRST® Robotics Competition, teams of high school students must build a robot in response to a specific challenge.

Working with adult mentors, students had six weeks to design, build, program, and test their robots to meet the season’s engineering challenge. By combining the excitement of sport and beauty of art with the rigors of science and technology, teams of high school students are challenged to design a team “brand,” hone teamwork skills, and build and program robots to perform tasks against a field of strong competitors.

The video below is the official game animation for the 2019 FIRST Robotics Competition game, DESTINATION DEEP SPACE. For more information, visit http://www.firstinspires.org/frc.

Further details and the complete event schedule are available here.

SOURCE: RPI News

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