Several Mars Area School District students competed in the FIRST® Tech Challenge (FTC) Pennsylvania State Championship, held virtually on May 22. 

Team Curiosity, including incoming junior Lindsey Gourash and incoming sophomores Connor Boltey, Mitchell Kulfan, Evan Szafranski and Isaac Thoman, earned the first place Motivate Award and the second place Connect Award.

The Motivate Award is presented to the team that demonstrates professionalism and enthusiasm for the overall philosophy of what it means to be a FTC Team. The Connect Award celebrates a team’s ability to connects the dots between the professional technical community, FIRST®, and the diversity of the engineering world.

This year’s competition asked students to design, build and program a robot to pick up and shoot discs into goals to score points; and, included an autonomous mode, through which software was implemented so that the robot could score points with no input from the team members. In addition to the competition, teams were judged on their design process and the FIRST® core values — Discovery, Innovation, Impact, Inclusion, and Teamwork.

The FTC program, open to students in Grades 7-12, challenges students to design, build and program robots to compete in team challenges. For more information, visit www.ftcpenn.org.