South Windsor High Wins World Robotics Championship
CBIA Member Companies Provide Mentoring, Funding
CBIA writer/editor
South Windsor High School's robotics team (pictured in maroon shirts) has taken top prize in the 2010 FIRST Robotics Competition World Championship. The team also won in 2007, making this their second world championship in four years. Watch the video.
Established in 1989, the nonprofit FIRST—For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology—creates programs to encourage young people's interest in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) and their pursuit of careers and educational opportunities in those fields. The organization describes its FIRST Robotics Competitions (FRC) as a "varsity sport of the mind, designed to help high-school-aged young people discover how interesting and rewarding the life of engineers and researchers can be."
The World Cup of Robotics
In FRCs, teams of students work with mentors to solve a common problem in six weeks, using a standard kit of parts and a specific set of rules. This year's world competition was held April 17 at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta. More than 340 robots from around the world competed. South Windsor's 18-member team earned top prize by navigating a robot and scoring goals in a soccer field filled with obstacles.
UTC Engineers Go Back to the Future
UTC Power, a CBIA member company, provided engineering mentors for Bobcats Robotics, South Windsor High School's team. The mentors, many of them graduates of South Windsor High themselves, have returned to coach today's students and guide them in designing and building their own robots.
“We are all very excited about the win and proud of the students,” says Eric O’Brien, one of four UTC Power mentors who traveled with the Bobcats to Atlanta. “The students worked extremely hard this year to continuously improve the robot so that they could compete on the world stage. Even after some tough matches and robot problems on the first day of competition, they we were able to get the robot functioning better than ever.”
Business Involvement Is Key
Dr. J. Michael McQuade, UTC's senior vice president of science and technology, calls FIRST "our largest employee involvement program," adding, "...this is where the employees of the future of UTC come from."
Several Connecticut high school robotics teams backed by United Technologies Corp. participated in the competition in Georgia. Other teams represented Windsor Locks, Enfield, Farmington, Avon, and Hartford high schools.
Northeast Utilities, also a CBIA member company, was the primary sponsor of the Connecticut Regional FIRST Robotics Competition held a few weeks earlier, April 1-3, in Hartford. The Connecticut Regional is New England's largest FIRST Robotics Competition.
Evan Goldberg, a substation associate engineer at NU, serves as a mentor to the Bobcats after having been on the team as a high school freshman in 2001. "It is a great inspiration to me personally, having risen from the Bobcat team myself, to know that the students and mentors NU supports are some of the extraordinary minds of today and my colleagues of tomorrow," he said.
"This team is a great example of why NU stepped up to be the region's title sponsor," says Patricia McCullough, president and executive director of the Northeast Utilities Foundation. "Besides motivating the students of South Windsor High School to participate in science and technology, the Bobcats have demonstrated the innovation and strategic thinking that will make them innovators in tomorrow's workforce."
