LuHi Students Advance to World Championship in FIRST Tech Challenge Robotics Competition

LuHi’s student team, Crusader Robotics (#11988), qualified in February at the East Super-Regional Championship in Scranton, PA, competing against the top 72 teams in the region.

“I couldn’t be more proud of my team’s effort and perseverance through the competition,” says Harold Kennedy, the LuHi team’s coach. “As a rookie team this season, they were up against some serious competition, and never wavered in being ambassadors of what it means to be a LuHi student. They are now hard at work assimilating everything they learned and making their robot better than ever.”

FIRST Tech is an international program robot-construction program offering hundreds of tournaments for student teams. More than 46,000 students in nearly 20 countries compete in the robot construction-and-performance events. Students aged 12 through 18 work alongside mentors to design, build, test and compete their machines.

LuHi’s Crusader Robotics team began participating last December in the current FIRST Tech Challenge season, dubbed VELOCITY VORTEX, hosting a regional scrimmage. The competing teams used WiFi-controlled phones to move their machines about on 12-by-12-foot playing fields, directing their robots to accomplish specified tasks.

LuHi’s Crusader Robotics is the only Long Island team advancing to the FIRST Tech World Championship this year. As in all FIRST competitions, the winning teams’ robots were those judged most capable of fulfilling tasks by virtue of their design, construction and programming, while maintaining gracious professionalism.