RAHS FireBears Robotics Team headed to FIRST Championship!!

The Roseville Area High School FireBears Robotics team will be traveling east for the FIRST Championship in Detroit, Mich., April 25-28, 2018, after qualifying for the event in Minneapolis.

Boston Scientific and United Technologies are the FireBears major sponsors, and they are supported by several Roseville area businesses and foundations. While sponsored for the season, the team is accepting donations to help defray the costs of the trip ($25,000) to Detroit for the Championships. For more information or to donate to the FireBears, email Lead Team Mentor Tom Lageson at tlageson@comcast.net.

The FireBears were finalists out of 60 teams at the FIRST Robotics Competition Medtronic Foundation Regional competition held at Williams Arena on the University of Minnesota campus March 30-31, 2018, and qualified as a wildcard team. At the competition, they were selected to join with the Granite City Gear Heads robotics team from St. Cloud, one of the top eight teams at the competition, and the alliance took second place, qualifying both teams for the FIRST Championship. The FireBears also took an individual team Imagery Award at the competition for "an outstanding visual aesthetic integration from the machine to the team appearance.” The FireBears were also finalists at the Lake Superior Regional Robotics Competition in Duluth March 8-10, 2018, and received the Imagery Award there, as well.

The team is made up of 49 very enthusiastic students from grades 9-12, and thirteen volunteer adult mentors guide the students in using CAD to design, fabricate, wire and program the robot.

Each January, FIRST releases their game standards worldwide, and each team has six weeks to design and build a robot to compete in that year’s games. This year, robotics teams are building robots that can place, or in the FireBears’ case, launch a covered milk crate onto one side of a scale or into a switch box. The teams gain points by keeping the scale tilted in their favor or the switch box turned on by placing more crates with the robot.

The international FIRST Championship is held to showcase and celebrate student robotics teams from FIRST Robotics Competition; FIRST Tech Challenge; FIRST LEGO League; and FIRST LEGO League Jr.

This year, more than 65,000 students, coaches, and supporters will participate at FIRST Championship events in Houston and Detroit. All the highlights – matches, interviews, and analysis – will be streamed live via Twitch at firstchampionship.org/watch-live

If you'd like to see see the team in action, you can check out their YouTube channel.

2018 Robot Reveal: https://youtu.be/rBZMXirQl_o

Medtronic Regional Highlights: https://youtu.be/U-GArrTtMIs