Robotics and Engineering Club advances to state tournament
By Tracy Ouellette
Editor
The East Troy Robotics and Engineering Club brought home the Inspire Award from the FIRST FTC Wisconsin Qualifying tournament in Madison Sunday and advanced to the state tournament.
Eighth-grader Joey Finch, sophomore Meghan Griffin, freshman Nik Prusinski and junior Tim Zinniker make up the eTREC team and competed in the qualifying tournament with their robot “Borg,” which they’ve been working on since September.
In the FTC qualifying rounds, the winner of the tournament Inspire Award is automatically advanced to the next level of competition, which means the eTREC team is headed to the First FTC State Tournament at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on Feb. 7.
“They did an excellent job,” team mentor Tim Griffin said. “They’re a great team and they work really well together. They’re very creative and really understand the engineering process.”
According to the FTC website (www.usfirst.org), the formally judged Inspire Award “is given to the team that truly embodied the ‘challenge’ of the FTC program. The team that receives the award is chosen by the judges as having best represented a ‘role-model’ FTC team.”
“It’s a really great thing First does,” Griffin said. “They don’t go on straight competition, but if a team really puts forth the effort and follows the engineering principles and knows what they’re doing, they get the chance to go on.”
Griffin said the most important team the members of the team learn from the process and competition is how to fail.
“It’s a huge part of engineering – failing and recovering from that failure and figuring out why it failed,” he said. “They did a great job of doing that. They’re very creative and open-minded and think outside the box and learned from their mistakes.”
The eTREC team, which placed 14th over all out of 20 teams, also finished in the top three in four other award categories. They were second in line for the Motivate Award Finalist and placed third for the Think Award, PTC Design Award, and Control Award.
East Troy is sending two teams to the First FTC State Championship; the Patronum Bots, which also won an Inspire Award Jan. 3 in its qualifying round, will also be competing.
