The Amersham team is comprised of students from year 8 to year 10 who want to learn new skills.
The Motivate Award recognises the team’s efforts to build awareness of the challenge in their local community and to spark others to get involved. The team raised over £8000 as part of their outreach efforts.
It was the team’s first time competing against other teams, making this a particularly impressive achievement for their debut season.
“Congratulations to The Amersham School! What an amazing achievement for a first-year team. Who knows what you’ll achieve in the years to come? Your enthusiasm for the challenge blew the judges away and we can’t wait to see other teams from Buckinghamshire get involved” shared Paige Totis, Regional Programme Manager for the East of England at FIRST UK.
The team also achieved a high score of 88 for their robot’s performance on the field. They had to design, build and program it to complete various tasks such as picking up blocks and lifting them into baskets.
FIRST Tech Challenge UK empowers young people aged 12-18 with the technical knowledge and soft skills to thrive in STEM and beyond. From September to March, working like teams in industry and often supported by a mentor, they design, build and program a robot to compete at progressive events. Teams hone new skills such as communication, teamwork, programming, project management, fundraising, design and engineering.
The programme is run by charity, FIRST UK, with a mission to make STEM less intimidating, more diverse and inclusive. Supported by Arm, XTX Markets, RTX, Gene Haas Foundation, Bloomberg, Salesforce and Qualcomm, the charity is part of the global FIRST movement established in 1989 which reaches 650,000 young people and 300,000 industry mentors worldwide each year.