Student-engineers win state title

World championships up next for CVU robotics

BY JADEN PARKER AND JACK GOURLAY CVU students

On Saturday, Feb 12, Champlain Valley Union High School hosted the Vermont FIRST Tech Challenge Robotics Championship, an international high school robotics competition where teams create robots to complete different challenges, connect with and mentor others in the STEM community and showcase all of their hard work at the competition.

Nineteen teams from all over Vermont participated in this year’s event, including two teams from CVU: the Varsity RoboHawks and the JV RoboRedhawks.

The varsity RoboHawks won the prestigious Inspire Award due to its outstanding performance in the judged engineering portfolio presentation and its extensive outreach to help establish six FIRST Lego League robotics teams in the CVSD middle schools, The Inspire Award recognizes the team with the best designed robot, teamwork and community outreach. The award also comes with an invitation to the World Championship in Houston, Texas, in April.

The two CVU teams cruised through the qualifying rounds of the robot competition, then sailed through the semi-finals. The best of three finals were intense with the two CVU teams working together against an alliance between Essex and U32. Each alliance won a match, forcing a tie breaker, which CVU won. The victory gave the CVU JV robotics team a slot alongside their varsity counterparts to the World Championship in April.

CVU Robotics is working on fundraising to get both teams and their robots to Houston for the competition in April. It will be a way to collaborate with teams from all over the world, practice teamwork and communication, and learn from some of the brightest international students in the fields of engineering and coding.

The teams are looking for local sponsors. Visit www.robohawks5741.com for more information.

A trip down memory lane with members of the Williston Historical Society