Over spring break, two First Team Challenge (FTC) teams who call Nova Labs home competed at FTC East, a Super-Regional Championship Tournament! The event was held at The University of Scranton from March 18-20 and hosted 72 teams from Maine to Virginia.

Nova Labs Robotics Team 8702, Grey Jedi, won the Think Award for best engineering notebook.

In their rookie year, Nova Labs Robotics Team 9901, Techie Titans, represented Virginia well and won the “Inspire Aware 2”.

Despite these accomplishments, neither team broke into the top 24 to secure a spot at the Worlds competition in St. Louis, Missouri, but each had an awesome experience!

Coaches from Grey Jedi remarked that FTC East was a very well run event with lots of great teams and robots. The kids enjoyed having a fun time socializing and meeting other competitors (and apparently spending hours engaged in light saber battles).

Although the robot for Grey Jedi was not performing well for most of the day (only one hang from the bar) it consistently scored on the dumpers, a few times with autonomous and some zip lines.

Despite some tough matches the team performed professionally and graciously and worked extremely hard until the end to try to earn a place in the finals (including aggressive marketing to try to get onto a finalist alliance) but didn’t make it.

The judging went extremely well according to the team.

In the end, if the robot had scored consistently above 160 points they may have broken into the top 12 teams and potentially chosen for the finals. But there were also some extremely high combined scores in the mid 500s to contend with. Grey Jedi would have easily been a contender to progress to Nationals if the robot lived up to the expectations it set in practice and past events. Even so, they had a great time and learned a lot in the process!

Techie Titans was excited to try again next year and will definitely be back!