Long Island Lutheran Middle & High School (LuHi) was once again home to FIRST® Tech Challenge Scrimmages – presented by School-Business Partnerships of Long Island, Inc. (SBPLI), which brought science and creativity together on a robotics playing field. On Saturday, December 9 and Sunday, December 10, twenty-nine teams from across Long Island competed in a friendly tournament-style scrimmage that prepared them for the upcoming season of FIRST RELIC RECOVERYSM (presented by Qualcomm).

Teams, comprised of students age 12 to 18, worked alongside adult mentors to design, build, program and operate robots to play a floor game in an alliance format on a 12-foot by 12-foot field. This season, FIRST Tech Challenge teams across the world are asked to don their adventurers’ hats to create robots capable of retrieving opponent-colored jewels from platforms, scoring glyphs into crypto boxes, creating cipher patterns, moving “relics” to a recovery zone and parking their robots on “balancing stones.”

FIRST Tech Challenge is an international program featuring hundreds of tournaments for more than 46,000 students in nearly 20 countries. Students demonstrate their problem-solving skills, creative thinking, teamwork, competitive play, sportsmanship and sense of community. During all FIRST Tech Challenge tournaments, teams work in alliances with the goal of scoring more points, awarded through accomplishing the aforementioned tasks, during 150 seconds of game play, which includes autonomous and driver-controlled periods, on a 12-by-12-foot playing field.

Last weekend's scrimmages were the first events in the 2017-2018 FIRST Tech Challenge season on Long Island. Long Island students will then use these robots to compete in Qualifier tournaments at Lynbrook High School (Sunday, January 7, 2018); Center Moriches High School (January 13-14, 2018); and Sewanhaka High School (January 27-28, 2018). Students will compete at these events for a chance to ultimately advance to the Championship tournament at Smithtown High School West (February 11, 2018).

“FIRST Tech Challenge is growing rapidly on Long Island and we are excited to see what this season holds,” says Janet Anderson, Program Director and SBPLI/FIRST Long Island representative. “We are incredibly thankful to LuHi for the generosity of welcoming us back for our second year, and for providing us with the assistance to expand to a second day of scrimmages. They are a wonderful partner and we look forward to continuing our relationship with them to benefit the students of Long Island.”
 

“The LuHi community is happy to host this FIRST Tech Challenge event,” says Ed Parry, Director of Summer Programs. “They loved the atmosphere and the people involved. We look forward to our continued involvement with FIRST and SBPLI in the coming years.”

For more information on SBPLI or the FIRST Long Island Robotics, please visit www.sbpli-lifirst.org.