{"id":65455,"date":"2016-01-23T15:00:27","date_gmt":"2016-01-23T20:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/?p=65455"},"modified":"2016-01-23T10:25:29","modified_gmt":"2016-01-23T15:25:29","slug":"robospartans-regional-robotics-champs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/?p=65455","title":{"rendered":"RoboSpartans Regional Robotics Champs"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"From<\/a>
From left front row are Ryan Payne, Kevin Valete and Gwyneth LaMarche. From left in back are Daniel Michaels, Douglas Hotvedt, Oscar Klempay, Matthew Strachen and Timothy Ha.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

(New Hartford, NY \u2013 Jan. 2016) The RoboSpartans FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) robotics team was victorious winning top prizes from SUNY Polytechnic Institute\u2019s Excelsior Region Championship recently.\u00a0 The team captained the Winning Alliance in the \u201cFIRST Res-Q\u201d challenge and won the top honor of the Inspire Award along with the Promote Award.\u00a0 The Inspire Award is given to the team that truly embodies the \u201cchallenge\u201d of the FTC Program.\u00a0\u00a0 The winner is an inspiration to other teams, acting with Gracious Professionalism, both on and off the playing field.<\/p>\n

The Promote Award required the team to produce a 60 second promotional video using the theme \u201cNow that I have succeeded in FIRST\u2026\u201d.\u00a0 The RoboSpartans, with\u00a0their robot, Laconicus, named after the last Spartan King, were seeded fourth at the end of five qualifying matches.\u00a0 In a gutsy move, they graciously declined an invitation to ally with the second\u00a0seeded team for the Finals and moved on to choose their own alliance that included a Rome team, Geared Up, and a Corning team, Gorillabots.\u00a0 The sixth-season RoboSpartans caught the judge\u2019s attention with their global and local outreach and technological savvy.\u00a0\u00a0The\u00a0finish earned \u00a0the RoboSpartans a spot at the East Super Regional Championship at the University of Scranton, March 18 to 20. The East Super Regional features the top 72 teams from Virginia to Maine, with winners moving on to the FIRST Tech Challenge World Championship in St. Louis in April.<\/p>\n

FTC teams compete in paired alliances in qualification matches followed by top ranking team finals.\u00a0 Trophies are award for robot performance as well as engineering, use of sensors, motivation and outreach. The recent growth of teams has helped spark interest by school districts to get involved in robotics and support teams.\u00a0 FIRST\u00a0– For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, offers a series of robotics programs reaching students ages 6 through 18.\u00a0 FIRST Tech Challenge, their fastest growing program, offers junior high to high school students an opportunity to experience hands-on engineering design, building, programming and competition with peers at a reasonable entry cost.\u00a0\u00a0 Locally, over a dozen engineers affiliated with the Mohawk Valley Engineers\u2019 Executive Council along with instructors from area colleges have contributed to the success of FTC by offering time as volunteers for\u00a0local events.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s great to have the community recognize the importance of high-school level robotics competition as a follow-up to FIRST LEGO League,\u201d said Lisa Payne, RoboSpartans Team Manager. \u00a0\u201cWe\u2019ve come so far from being the only team in the area just a short time ago to having a SUNY Poly Championship with a great showing by so many area teams. The potential for local students to head to college with FIRST scholarships is amazing.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0FIRST – For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, offers $20 Million in college scholarships annually to students in their high school level programs.<\/p>\n

The basement-based RoboSpartans team consists of members from New Hartford and Utica and includes:\u00a0\u00a0 Timothy Ha, Douglas Hotvedt, Oscar Klempay, Gwyneth LaMarche, Daniel Michaels, Ryan Payne, Matthew Strachen and Kevin Vedete.\u00a0 The team is coached by Bob and Lisa Payne of New Hartford and supported by team families and business sponsors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(New Hartford, NY \u2013 Jan. 2016) The RoboSpartans FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) robotics team was victorious winning top prizes from SUNY Polytechnic Institute\u2019s Excelsior Region Championship recently.\u00a0 The team captained the Winning Alliance in the \u201cFIRST Res-Q\u201d challenge and won the top honor of the Inspire Award along with the Promote Award.\u00a0 The Inspire Award […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22341],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65455","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-regional"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65455","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=65455"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65455\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=65455"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=65455"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/madisoncountycourier.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=65455"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}