The 2011-2012 robotics season was a huge success for LEARN teams. In the Regional Qualifiers:
- Our three-person, rookie FTC team - The Red Hot Techie Peppers - won the First Place Motivate Award and 2nd Place Inspire Award.
- Our FLL Shadow Knights won the Chairman's Award.
- Our FLL Rock'n Robo Rabbits won the First Place Teamwork Award.
All of our teams advanced to the next level of competition.
The Rock'n Robo Rabbits Earn a Spot at World Festival
At the Western Missouri and Kansas FLL Regionals, the Rock'n Robo Rabbits won the top honor - The Chairman's Award. This award recognizes the team that embodies the FLL experience, but fully embracing our Core Values while achieving excellence and innovation in both the Robot Game and Project.
The Rock'n Robo Rabbits will represent our region at the 2011-12 FIRST Robotics Worl Festival, an honor accorded only 86 FLL teams out of more than 16,000 from around the world. The FIRST Robotics World Festival is the Super Bowl of K-12 robotics.
This four-day event fills the 550,000+ square feet of America’s Center and Edward Jones Dome in St. Louis, MO with:
- 500+ high school teams
- 86 middle and elementary school teams
- 11,000+ kids from around the world; teams from over thirty countries will be attending
- 5,000+ mentors and coaches
- 25,000+ spectators including teachers, fans, family members, VIP guests and representatives from high-profile technical companies, universities and the press from around the world.
The Red Hot Techie Pepper Take the FTC State Championship By Storm
The Red Hot Techie Peppers advanced to the Missouri State Championship, and they did phenomenally well. Throughout the competition, they ranked in the top ten in robot performance. In addition, their outstanding outreach and community service programs earned the team the Connect Award. The Connect Award recognizes the team that " most connected with their local community and the engineering community. A true FIRST team is more than a sum of its parts, and recognizes that their schools and communities play an essential part to their success. The recipient of this award is recognized for helping the community understand FIRST, the FIRST Tech Challenge, and the team itself. The team that wins this award is aggressively seeking engineers and exploring the opportunities available in the world of engineering, science and technology."
The Shadow Knights Place in Top Twelve at Regionals
Our Shadow Knights advanced to the Western Missouri and Kansas FLL Regional Championships and earned the First Place Award for Project Research. This award recognizes teams that "utilize diverse resources to formulate an in-depth and comprehensive comprehensive understanding of the problem they have identified." The Shadow Knights proposed a revoluntionary invention called, "Stick-EZ" that could save tens of thousands of lives each year by detecting and reporting food-borne diseases and pesticide contamination before food reaches consumers' tables. They worked with experts from UMKC's chemistry and biomedical engineering departments, MRI Global, restaurants, local farms and grocery stores to formulate their invention.
The Salad Heads Win Team Spirit Award
Our Junior FIRST LEGO League team - The Salad Heads - also won top honors at the Western Missouri and Kansas Jr.FLL Exhibition. For their good cheer, clever project and sweet "salad head" hats and masks, they won the Team Spirit Award.