At the December 2024 Gaithersburg Regional Qualifier, Minerva's Mechanics was the winner of the Innovate Award. "The Innovate Award celebrates a Team that thinks imaginatively and has the ingenuity, creativity, and inventiveness to make their designs come to life. This judged award is given to the Team that has the most innovative and creative Robot design solution to any specific components in the FIRST Tech Challenge game. Elements of this award include elegant design, robustness, and ‘out of the box’ thinking related to design." (FIRST Award Description) Additionally, they qualified 9th of 35 teams and and their final alliance placed 4th overall.
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Each and every year, we strive to achieve more as our students gain more experience and learn more about robotics. We have worked incredibly hard to build successful teams and robots that compete at a high level. This hard work has paid off as each new year we continue to outperform the previous year.
This year, our teams regularly qualified in the top 10 amongst teams from Maryland, Virginia, Washington DC, and the whole Chesapeake region. They served as alliance captains, role models, and mentors to younger students in competition. Minerva’s Mechanics qualified for the Inspire Award. This award is defined by FIRST as the team “that best embodies the ‘challenge’ of the FIRST Tech Challenge program. The Team that receives this award is a strong ambassador for FIRST programs and a role model FIRST Team. The Inspire Award winner is an inspiration to other Teams, acting with Gracious Professionalism® both on and off the Playing Field. This Team shares their experiences, enthusiasm and knowledge with other Teams,”
Additionally, the team won the FTC Think Award. This award is defined as being “given to the team that best reflects the journey the team took as they experienced the engineering design process during the build season. The engineering content within the portfolio is the key reference for judges to help identity the most deserving team. The teams engineering content must focus on the design and build stage of the team’s robot. The team must be able to share or provide additional detailed information that is helpful for the judges. This could include descriptions of the underlying science and mathematics of the robot design and game strategies, the designs, redesigns, successes, and opportunities for improvement.”
In addition to these FTC awards, our teams are proud of the growth we have made this year in creating a more inclusive, diverse team, specifically significantly increasing the representation of women and typically underrepresented groups in STEM. At this time, our teams show a greater diversity than that of our school.
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