Robotics team finishes 12th at world competition

May 3, 2011

Team pic 4-40-11 — Front Row: Ashley Neal, Ben Lyon, Tim Gruber-Miller, Lynaea kiefer, and Daniel Riechers Back Row: Steven Gruber-Miller, Matthew Lichty, Forrest Scott, Matt Peiffer, and Nicholas Liberko

Mount Vernon’s Team #458, named Activate Go Initiative!, finished qualifying matches with a 5 and 2 record at the FTC World Robotics Championships last weekend in St. Louis. This put Mount Vernon in 12th place out of 64 teams in their division. There were also 64 teams in another division. On Friday night, 12 teams were chosen from each division for the finals but Mount Vernon narrowly missed out. Instead of the top 12 teams from each division qualifying, the top 4 teams each chose 2 teams to be on their alliance. See links below to watch matches and other interesting videos.

The team is led by senior program manager Forrest Scott. The rest of the team consists of seniors Matthew Lichty, Ben Lyon, Daniel Riechers, Stephen Gruber-Miller, Lynaea Kiefer, juniors Nicholas Liberko, Matt Peiffer, Ashley Neal, and sophomore Tim Gruber-Miller. They are mentored by Gary Scott, Chris Lyon, Jerry Sheehy, Cheryl Sheehy, DeAnn Scearce, Ryan Moffitt, Gary Kiefer, and Beth Riechers. They are coached by Richard Scearce.

More than 600 teams from 29 countries competed in the three levels of FIRST:
FIRST® LEGO® League (FLL®, grades 4 to 8 )
FIRST® Tech Challenge (FTC®, grades 9 to 12); and
FIRST® Robotics Competition (FRC®, grades 9 to 12).

Recording artist will.i.am and inventor and founder of FIRST, Dean Kamen, matched robotic wits and Morgan Freeman refereed a robotics match as 11,000 Students and their Robots Competed.

On Friday night, The Black Eyed Peas hosted a special free concert to honor the FIRST students and the largest contingency ever, at 25,000 attendees. CBS filmed the concert and other aspects of the event, including robot matches. They announced they would be broadcasting the program on August 14th at 7:00 pm so mark your calendars.

Video From Sat.