FIRST Tech Challenge robotics competitions are so popular that some 150 students from six states and Romania converged here last weekend — during summer vacation — to do battle. “What I am most amazed at is this is what they want to do with their time off,” said Tom Bredemeier, a computer science teacher at Barrington High School, who took one of his school’s 10 teams to the event held at Deerfield High School.
It almost didn’t matter that Fish in the Boat, the World Champions from Minnesota, tied with Barrington’s That’s a Good Question team for first place. What seemed to matter more was the joy of designing, building, programming and operating their own robots to complete tasks designated in the competition. It is no coincidence that FIRST is an acronym for For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology.
Asked why he is spending his summer vacation in a high school gym operating robots, sophomore A.J. Priola first explained how he and friend J.J. Xu petitioned to launch the robotics team at Barrington High School and how they spent countless hours in Bredemeier’s lab every day after school.
Roshaan Siddqui, a seventh-grader at Chicago Math and Science Academy said: “I want to be a computer engineer. I can get a scholarship doing this.”
Jonathan Weiland, a biology teacher and robotics mentor at Highland Park High School, confirmed that Siddqui is not exaggerating. The FTC awards between about $15 million in scholarships each year, Weiland said. Last year one of every three robotics students who applied received a scholarship, he said. “Of the 10,000 students I’ve taught at Highland Park in 10 years, about five or 10 turned professional in sports,” Weiland said. “But we’ve sent thousands of kids to high-powered science and engineering schools. We know every kid on this field today will be successful professionally.”
Dan Green, executive director of Illinois FIRST, said the goal of FTC is simply to get kids as excited about technology as they usually are about sports.
Copyright © 2013 — Sun-Times Media, LLC
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