Newfane takes home FIRST awards

Local News

March 17, 2011

Going for seconds in DC

By Joe Olenick Lockport Union-Sun & Journal The Lockport Union-Sun %26 Journal Thu Mar 17, 2011, 12:50 AM EDT

NEWFANE — The FIRST robotics season has gotten off to a promising start for the Newfane Circuit Stompers, who made it to the quarterfinals in the regional competition in Pittsburgh over the weekend.

The high school team faced off against 40 teams in the competition, taking home some awards for their efforts.

The team was happy with its performance but was really looking forward to its next competition March 24 through 26 in Washington, DC, said club adviser Susan Lanighan.

“We’re very excited about the potential for Washington,” she said.

Junior Ginny Larimore, 16, said the team is working on making improvements on its performance.

“We’re going to learn and try to be better in Washington,” Larimore said.

FIRST is the “For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology” organization. It is a group that introduces students to professional engineers, scientists, business leaders and other mentors to promote science and technology as career possibilities. High school students enter competitions that require them to design and build robots to complete certain tasks.

This year teams had to build a robot that could hang as many inflated triangles, circles and squares as they could during a 2 minute 15 second match. The higher the shapes (taken from the FIRST logo) are hung the more points they are worth. At the end of the match the robots deploy a smaller robot that races to the top of a pole for more points. Each team will play alongside two others in an alliance, competing against another alliance of three teams.

In Pittsburgh, Newfane won six matches and lost four in the opening round, before moving on to the quarterfinals. While they came up short in that round against an alliance that included Lockport High School, Newfane was able to win a few unique awards.

Lanighan said the team won the Motorola Quality Award for their robot design, as well as the AutoDesk Excellence in Design Award. That award was given to Newfane for their animated video, which was created and designed by the students themselves.

The video was about how the team could help an alien who was looking for help on how to make his planet more energy efficient. The team built an energy efficient car, a car the alien drove from Newfane to Pittsburgh to other FIRST regional sites before stopping at St. Louis, the site of the 2011 FIRST Championship.

The students had done a nice job, Lanighan said. They did all of the rendering themselves, which gave the video a realistic feel. It looked the alien was actually driving in the streets of Pittsburgh, Lanighan said.

Newfane senior Rollin Hellner won Safety Star of the Day for his work on promoting safety. Lanighan said Hellner had come up with an innovative way to promote safety with other teams. Newfane would ask safety questions to other teams and if they answered correctly they would receive a small prize, such as candy.

Contact reporter Joe Olenick at 439-9222, ext. 6241.

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