The FIRST® Tech Challenge season – dubbed FIRST RELIC RECOVERYSM (presented by Qualcomm) – will begin on Sunday, January 7, 2018 with a Qualifying Tournament at Lynbrook High School. Four additional events will be hosted at Center Moriches and Sewanhaka High Schools in the weeks to follow. Presented locally by School-Business Partnerships of Long Island, Inc. (SBPLI), FIRST® Tech Challenge inspires students age 12 to 18 to pursue an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields.

Working alongside adult mentors, more than 46,000 students in nearly 20 countries have spent the last several months designing, building, programming and operating robots to play a floor game in an alliance format on a 12-foot by 12-foot field. This season, FIRST Tech Challenge teams across the world are asked to don their adventurers’ hats to create robots capable of retrieving opponent-colored jewels from platforms, scoring glyphs into crypto boxes, creating cipher patterns, moving “relics” to a recovery zone and parking their robots on “balancing stones.”

Students demonstrate their problem-solving skills, creative thinking, teamwork, competitive play, sportsmanship and sense of community. During all FIRST Tech Challenge tournaments, teams work to score points, awarded through accomplishing the aforementioned tasks, during 150 seconds of game play, which includes autonomous and driver-controlled periods.

The 2018 FIRST Long Island Qualifiers will be held as follows:

Sunday, January 7, 2018 at Lynbrook High School

Sunday, January 13-14, 2018 at Center Moriches High School

Saturday, January 27-28, 2018 at Sewanhaka High School

Awards that will be given during each tournament include:

• Inspire Award: team that best exemplifies the spirit of FIRST Tech Challenge
• Think Award: team that best manages the engineering design process
• Connect Award: team most connected to the local and engineering communities
• Rockwell Collins Innovate Award: team with the most ingenuity and inventiveness
• PTC® Design Award: team with the most compelling industrial design elements
• Motivate Award: team acts as Ambassadors for FIRST; exemplifies outstanding outreach/recruitment efforts
• Control Award: team that uses sensors and software to enhance the robot’s functionality on the field
• Winning Alliance Award: alliance that wins the final elimination rounds
• Finalist Alliance Award: alliance in the final match of the competition

Students will compete at these events for a chance to ultimately advance to the FIRST Long Island Championship presented by SBPLI at Smithtown High School West on Sunday, February 11, 2018. Three teams from the FIRST Long Island Championship will go on to the Super-Regional Championship Tournament in Pennsylvania, and may then advance to the FIRST Tech Challenge World Championship in April.

“Since launching locally last year, FIRST Tech Challenge has grown into a powerful program for students across Long Island, and we are excited to see what the teams have come up with,” says Janet Anderson, Program Director and SBPLI/FIRST Long Island representative. “We are grateful to all of the high schools that are working with us to present FIRST Tech Challenge events and to showcase our local STEM talent. We look forward to continued partnerships with these districts.”