Plymouth-Canton to Host FIRST Robotics Championships on Saturday

Submitted by Sarah Leeson:

Plymouth-Canton Educational Park's FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) team is hosting the Eastern Michigan Championship event for middle school students from 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday at Discovery Middle School for qualifying FIRST Technical Challenge (FTC) teams.

The middle school students on these FTC teams work in groups of up to ten members to design and fabricate a robot that fits this season's new game, Ring It Up. 

The hosting team, Lightning Robotics, will stage a competition for the first time in order to expand the team’s efforts in advocating and promoting science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education to younger students. This event gives the students a chance to exhibit their engineering projects and practice gracious professionalism, a main tenant of FIRST's philosophy.

Christopher Morgan, Lightning Robotics Lead Mentor and Event Coordinator of the event said, "The students of FRC Team 862, Lightning Robotics, wanted to apply themselves to a new, worthy and exciting task that would benefit the community. We heard that FIRST was aiming to grow the FTC program in Michigan and needed teams to host events, and the students launched into action. They were more than willing to take on this challenge to support FIRST and the students within it."

The FTC program, launched only seven years ago, has grown to over 2000 teams around the globe while all of FIRST now reaches nearly 300,000 students worldwide. The STEM education and hands-on practice the students receive will put them in a good position to secure jobs and college acceptances in the future. FIRST is also partnered with many universities and colleges which offer over $16 million in scholarships specifically for students of FIRST teams, 40% of which can be used to pursue any major. " 

For more information on the non-profit organization these robotics teams and competitions run through, visit http://www.usfirst.org/. For additional information on the team hosting the event, please visit www.lightningrobotics.com.

• WHAT: Eastern Michigan FIRST Technical Challenge Championship
• WHEN: 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday
• WHERE: Discovery Middle School, Canton