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District 113 notes
Updated: January 28, 2013 6:10AM
Robotic champions
The Beastie Bots (3785) won the Illinois State FTC Robotics Championship, earning their third Invitation to the World Championships in St. Louis. The Beastie Bots, which ended the qualifying portion of the event in third place, include Jacob Burroughs, Shira Shartiag, Liam Carter, Samuel Chase, Isaac Gibson, Rory Miller, Ketan Patel, Benjamin H. Rubin, Edward Smoliak, Justin Brook and Jonny Cohen.
Girls Gone Wired (6429) finished the qualifying rounds in first place with a perfect match record of 5-0. Girls Gone Wired team members are Rachel Glikin, Pia Sanpitak and Danielle Seedman.
District 113 teams were members of all four alliances in the elimination rounds. Girls Gone Wired (6429) was the captain of the top-seeded alliance, and the Beastie Bots (3785) captained the third-seeded alliance. Da Big Meks (5451) was on the fourth-seeded alliance, had the most consistent autonomous program in the entire tournament, and finished the elimination rounds in second place. Da Big Meks team includes Ian Blank, Joshua Elster, Maxwell Jacobson, Alec Mecklenburger, Cody Newman, Samuel Sosonkin, Blake Stewart and Zachary Wells. The Warbots (6287) joined the second-seeded alliance in the elimination rounds. The DHS Warbots include Tim Angeles, Thomas Camp, Max Mesirow, Jonathan Wexler, Julian Whitt, Michael Rascati and Barrett Turnoy.
District 113 Robotics won three of eight possible awards at the State Tournament. Da Big Meks (5451) won the Motivate Award. The Beastie Bots (3785) won the Connect Award. Girls Gone Wired (6249) won the Judges Award for their outreach efforts. Rory Miller’s programming and documentation also earned recognition in the software category.
The Motivate Award celebrates the team that exemplifies the essence of the FIRST Tech Challenge competition through team spirit and enthusiasm. They showed their spirit through costumes and fun outfits, a team cheer or outstanding spirit. This team also has made a collective effort to make FIRST known throughout their school and community.
The Connect Award is given to 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 role in 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 reaching out to engineers and exploring the opportunities available in the world of engineering, science and technology.
