From left, Vishnu Murthy, Fairfax, Thomas Jefferson High School; Hossain Rahman, Chantilly, coach; Jasmine Malik, Chantilly, John Champe High School; Ameen Alouou, Centreville, Rocky Run Middle School; Ridha Chowdhary, Chantilly, Eagle Ridge Middle School; Natasha Rao, Fairfax, Thomas Jefferson High School; Vinay Jagan, Stone Ridge, Mercer Middle School; Faraaz Rahman, Chantilly, Michael Lunsford Middle School; Sonika Vuyyuru, Chantilly, Stone Hill Middle School. Photo contributed
The rookie “Techie Titans”, a FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) robotics team from Nova Labs Robotics of Reston advanced to state championships in both Virginia and Maryland with multiple awards from regional tournaments.
They advanced further to the East Super-Regional Championship tournament from Virginia State Championship held on Feb 13.
The team consists of students from middle and high schoolers in Fairfax and Loudoun counties. It is divided into several sub-teams such as build, programming, CAD, outreach, and fundraising.
FTC is one of the robotics programs organized by FIRST for students in grades 7-12. In the competition teams are responsible for designing, constructing and programming a robot to compete against other teams in tournament.
Teams, along with their coaches, mentors, and volunteers develop strategy and build their robots based on reliable engineering principles. Robots are built from robot kits, metals, and 3D printed pieces and controlled by Qualcomm Snapdragon-based processor in FTC Android Platform based on Java programming. Awards and recognition are given out for the competition and other real-world aspects of FTC, such as design, innovation, and community outreach.