A group of local high school students has an exciting trip planned this summer.
Team Titanium, a FIRST Robotics team with Lee's Summit West High School, was chosen as one of only 15 international teams to travel to China for a robotics competition. The China Urban Youth Robotics Alliance, or CUYRA, invited the team to this year's 4th China Robotics Challenge held in Zhengzhou.
The competition will be held July 26 through 29. CUYRA is contributing $15,000 towards Team Titanium's trip, but they still need to raise $10,000 more.
Team Titanium FRC 1989 took 2nd place in this year's FIRST Robotics World Championship Competition.
"They were just three points shy of being that World Champion," said coach Aaron Bailey. "We started the team back in 2007 and it has been getting better every year."
The competition looks like a life-sized board game with robots as the pawns.
"We have six weeks to build the robots to solve a problem that we are presented with at the beginning of January," said teammate Daniel Schnelle, a recent graduate looking to study mechanical engineering. "At the end of the six weeks we have to put the robot into a sealed bag and we cannot touch or work on our robot until we get to our competition."
Robots for this year's competition had to collect gears and move them to a central location, shoot balls into a tube and climb a rope before the round ended. Each of these tasks gains the team points.
"There's 3,000 teams," said Schnelle. "I don't know of any time where there's been two identical robots. We build with sheet metal, so ours is never like anybody else's."
"We love watching these kids work hand to hand with professionals to build, to fold metal, to wire robots, to learn these deep technical skills, but also know what it means to work really, really hard," said Bailey. "We want our kids to know there are great job opportunities right here, you don't have to leave our community. We want to make Lee's Summit a great place to live."
According to its mission statement, FIRST Robotics works to "inspire young people to be science and technology leaders, by engaging them in exciting Mentor-based programs that build science, engineering and technology skills, that inspire innovation."
Many students who participate end up following the career path to technology and/or science jobs.
"A lot of our team is planning on going into multiple varieties of engineering. We have electrical, mechanical, civil, engineering management," said Schnelle.
To learn more about FIRST click here: https://www.firstinspires.org/
If you would like to help Team Titanium on their voyage to China there are two ways to do so:
GoFundMe: www.gofundme.com/titaniumtochina
Mail: Payable to "LSWHS Robotics", and sent to LSWHS Robotics, c/o Nancy Spatz, 2600 SW Ward Rd., Lee's Summit, MO 64081
