Team Innovo advances to the Super-Regionals

The Hewlett High School robotics teams took home 11 of the 22 awards presented, including two category sweeps, at the FIRST Tech Challenge Long Island Championship Tournament held at Smithtown High School West on Feb. 11.

After three qualifying tournaments held in January, the top 24 teams of 45 on Long Island were selected to compete in the Long Island championship. Team Innovo is now one of three teams to move onto the Super-Regionals taking place at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania on March 17-19. After that it’s the FIRST Tech Challenge World Championship on April 26-29 at America’s Center Dome in St. Louis, Missouri.

FIRST, or For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology, is a not-for-profit organization with the goal of inspiring young people to engage in science and technology, as well as encourage students to pursue careers in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields.

The FIRST Tech Challenge is a competition for students in grades 7 through 12 in which teams design, build, program and operate robots. They then compete in “an alliance format,” according to the FIRST website. Roughly 5,500 teams and 55,000 participants between the ages of 12 and 18 competed in the 2016-17 FIRST Tech Challenge, the website states.

Students program robots using Java, a programming language and computing platform, to compete on a 12-foot by 12-foot field. Each team participated in five matches throughout the day. After the match rounds, the top four teams become “Alliance Captains” for the finals rounds. Team Innovo became the first place Alliance Captain as a result of finishing first in match play and Team RoboBoogie became the second Alliance Captain.

Since September, the Hewlett robotics teams have worked roughly six hours each Friday night to prepare for the competition. “The awards are not really even the best part of the day,” robotics coach Janine Torresson said. “The confidence developed, the camaraderie fostered, the pressured situations answered, the miscommunications forgiven, and the dialogues and opportunities for personal growth that these will inspire are really just the beginning of the impact this has on all who are involved.”