The Latta High School robotics team STEAM Punks #11841 recently traveled to Houston, TX where they participated in the FIRST Tech World Championship 2023 event.
This culminated a season where they overcame numerous obstacles to win the State Championship and win their berth in this world championship event.
The team of five students and two coaches were accompanied by parents, grandparents and robot enthusiasts on their trip. This team participated in the FIRST Tech Challenge league where they joined 191 other teams from around the world in competition. In conjunction, the FIRST Robotics league and the FIRST Lego league were also competing.
The entire event hosted almost 1000 teams and over 45,000 people were in attendance.
Teams from over 40 countries participated in the competition which saw some matches announced in Romanian, Arabic and Spanish among others.
The STEAM Punks competed in eleven matches over the course of four days which also included robot inspections, robot judging and other sessions.
Matches were televised world-wide over Twitch.tv and our STEAM Punks had a good showing during the event. Both the robot and team members performed very well and consistently across their eleven matches with only one minor mechanical glitch that was quickly repaired in the pits between matches.
Team members did not seem to be distracted or affected by the lights, cheers and cacophony while on stage in front of thousands of spectators and performed like seasoned pros. In one of their matches they were the only American team out of four on the field.
While the STEAM Punks performed well, some unfortunate match-ups with alliance partners hindered some of their scores so that they did not qualify for the championship bracket on the final day of competition.
However, it was certainly a good showing and they have brought back a wealth of knowledge with hopes to achieve more in the future. We certainly want to offer our profuse thanks to the many sponsors and donors that helped the team achieve such a spectacular goal. They were recognized on our website, banners and t-shirts.
More information about the team can be found at https://www.dillon3.k12.sc.us/robotics.php.