Fayette County’s FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) team brought home the Team Spirit Award from the Smoky Mountain Regional, and club leader Michael Halwes was selected as a Dean’s List Award finalist. Michael is invited to the FRC World Championship April 24-27 in St. Louis, where 10 winners will be named.
In this year’s challenge, “Ultimate Ascent,” students worked together to design a robot that could accurately shoot discs across a 54-foot field. At the regional showdown, robots were randomly paired in two competing alliances. Each alliance, consisting of three robots, tried to score as many discs into their goals as possible in a two-minute match. The robots could also attempt to climb two pyramids for additional points. The Smoky Mountain Regional was March 28-30 in Knoxville, Tenn.
FIRST stands for “For the Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology.” The Fayette County FRC team is open to all the high schools in Lexington, and Lexmark engineers help mentor the students. For more information, contact co-sponsor Melanie Timmers.
This year’s group includes Kirk Hardy of Lafayette High and Paul Laurence Dunbar students Rishi Alluri, Satya Alluri, Elliott Beach, James Birchfield, David Bosomworth, Beth Anne Brumfield, Sarah Caywood, Jacob Cottrell, Yang Chen, Phillip Chung, Nick Cooney, Dustin Doss, Vikram Dudee, Zach Estus, Hayato Furuki, Jonathan Greer, Yutong Gu, Dean Hadi, Michael Halwes, Seony Han, Madison Hopkins, Morgan Hopkins, Sarah Jeong, Aaron Karp, Lydia Livas, Keiji Maeda, Robert McGillivray, Abraham Mendoza, Shankar Miller-Murthy, Will Oldham, Monon Rahman, Joseph Schneider, Mitchell Slavik, Yashwanth Venkatesan, Iven Yang, Jared Young and Adil Yusof.