Team 1511 brings home the World Championship Judges Award
With a 5 wins, 2 losses record, Rolling Thunder Penfield Robotics team ended up seeded 12th out of 88 in our division, no one is quite sure why we weren’t picked up by one of the top 8 seeded teams for the elimination rounds, but it just didn’t work out for us. Nevertheless our robot and drive team did an awesome and quite commendable job! We had
zero mechanical failures on the field, and the pit crew aided by an excellent design, did an outstanding job of keeping things up and running. The drive team was equally commendable on
both their outstanding offensive and excellent defensive strategy. Aided by the strong and dedicated
scouting team they assisted their alliance in defeating the only remaining undefeated robot in the Newton division in our final qualification match, pinning the top robot and preventing it from scoring effectively. Everyone worked to put together a season, a team and a robot they could be proud of.
As you all know our eventual goal is to become a World Champion Chairman’s Award team. Our presentation team, our pit crew, and the entire team spent the weekend showing the judges and the rest of FIRST that we are eligible to be represented at the championship level (we won the regional Chairman’s award in Chesapeake). This year’s Chairman’s award was won by
Team 236, an awesome team out of Connecticut, but the judges saw our excellent performance, saw what a solid, student-built robot we’d created, listened to what our presentation team said, read our essay, viewed our video, talked to our mentors and evaluated our overall performance as a team.
FIRST awarded us a special Judges Award for being an “all-year, all-around team that exemplifies the standards and visions of FIRST.” This is an awesome achievement, and our first World Championship award since winning the World Championship Rookie All-Star in 2005. The team is understandably excited and proud to be bringing this achievement back to Rochester, NY –
the only Upstate New York team to bring an award home from the World Championships besides a divisional finalist team from our area – 1507 from Lockport, NY (they were on the winning alliance for our Division (Newton) but were eliminated in the semi-finals on the Einstein field).
Those of you who are parents on the team should be proud of your son’s or daughter’s achievement. This is an award given out only to teams that the Judges recognize as being head and shoulders above the rest of
the WORLD. There were 350 teams in Atlanta from all over the world.
Only 2 were selected for Judges awards this year. You know how hard they all worked on the team, and that this is the result of their dedication and sacrifice.
Those of you who are sponsors should know that your contribution of time or dollars has helped make us the highly successful team we are today, and that your team has gotten
international recognition for its efforts.
Those of you who are mentors already know what a great group of kids we had this year, and I know you are proud of them all.
Kim O’Toole, the team leader, deserves special recognition for her dedication, vision, and unfailing belief in the students. While the kids accomplished the tasks it was Kim’s vision that created the team direction.
Excellent job, and now we look forward to having an even better year in 2010.
Thank you for your support over the last year.
Cheers,
Lee Drake, Business Team Mentor, Team 1511
for more information about Penfield robotics visit our award winning website at:
http://www.penfieldrobotics.com/
